Tutelo language

Tutelo
Tutelo-Saponi
Tutelo language region prior to European colonization.
Native to	United States
Region	Virginia, West Virginia; later Pennsylvania, New York, Ontario
Ethnicity	Tutelo, Saponi, Occaneechi, Manahoac, Monacan
Extinct	after 1982 with the death of Albert Green[1]
Language family	Siouan Western Siouan Ohio Valley Siouan Virginia Siouan Tutelo
Language codes
ISO 639-3	tta
Linguist List	tta
Glottolog	tute1247

Tutelo, also known as Tutelo–Saponi, is a member of the Virginian branch of Siouan languages that were originally spoken in what is now Virginia and West Virginia in the United States.

Most Tutelo speakers migrated north to escape warfare. They traveled through North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New York. In 1753, the Tutelo had joined the Iroquois Confederacy under the sponsorship of the Cayuga. They finally settled in Ontario after the American Revolutionary War at what is now known as Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation.

Nikonha, the last fluent speaker in Tutelo country, died in 1871 at age 106. The year before, he had managed to impart about 100 words of vocabulary to the ethnologist Horatio Hale, who had visited him at the Six Nations Reserve.^[2][3]

Descendants living at Grand River Reserve in Ontario spoke Tutelo well into the 20th century/ Linguists including Horatio Hale, J. N. B. Hewitt, James Owen Dorsey, Leo J. Frachtenberg, Edward Sapir, Frank Speck, and Marianne Mithun recorded the language. The last active speakers, a mother and daughter, died in a house fire shortly before Mithun's visit in 1982. The last native speaker, Albert Green, died sometime after that.^[4]