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Language Lineage

Eastern Algonquian

The only proven subgroup within Algonquian, set up by Ives Goddard on shared innovations. Its languages, among them Mi'kmaq, Wampanoag (Massachusett), Lenape and Powhatan, were the first American languages English speakers met.

c. 1st millennium CE – presentThe Atlantic coast from the Maritimes to North Carolina
On this page
  1. The Coast
  2. The Eliot Bible and Its Return
  3. Where it's spoken
  4. Turning points

01

The Coast

Eastern Algonquian languages were spoken along the whole Atlantic coast from Nova Scotia to North Carolina. They were the first American languages that English colonists met, and English took from them moose, skunk, moccasin, raccoon, squash, tomahawk and many place names, including Massachusetts and Connecticut. Most of them lost their speakers within two centuries of colonisation. Powhatan, the language of Pocahontas, is known only from short word lists.

02

The Eliot Bible and Its Return

In 1663 the Puritan missionary John Eliot, working with Wampanoag translators such as John Sassamon and Job Nesutan, published a complete Bible in Massachusett. It was the first Bible printed in the Americas. Wampanoag communities went on writing letters, deeds and records in the language into the 18th century, and then its last speakers died.

In 1993 Jessie Little Doe Baird founded the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project. Working from the Eliot Bible and the community's colonial documents, she and linguists reconstructed the language. Children are again being raised speaking it, the first after more than a century without speakers.

On the map

Where it’s spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. Canadac. 7,000
  2. United Statesa few hundred

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Splitc. 1st millennium CEContested

    To the Atlantic

    Eastern Algonquian speakers spread along the Atlantic coast and diverge into the coastal languages. It is the one Algonquian subgroup defined by shared innovations, although its date is uncertain.

    Sources (1)
    • Goddard, Ives, ed. 1996. Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 17: Languages. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
  2. Contact1600s onward

    First words of American English

    Colonists in Virginia and New England take Algonquian words for unfamiliar animals, plants and things (raccoon, moose, skunk, squash, moccasin), which become part of English.

    Sources (1)
    • Mithun, Marianne. 1999. The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  3. Writing1663

    The Eliot Bible

    John Eliot and Wampanoag translators publish the complete Bible in Massachusett, the first Bible printed in the Americas. A Wampanoag written tradition of letters and deeds follows.

    Figures · John Eliot (1604–1690)

    Sources (1)
    • Eliot, John, trans. 1663. Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God. Cambridge, MA: Samuel Green & Marmaduke Johnson.
  4. Extinction18th – 19th centuryContested

    The coastal languages fall silent

    War, epidemics and dispossession end the use of most Eastern Algonquian languages south of Maine, including Massachusett, Powhatan and Mohegan-Pequot. The dates for individual languages are poorly recorded.

    Sources (1)
    • Goddard, Ives, ed. 1996. Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 17: Languages. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
  5. Revitalization1993 onward

    Wampanoag reclaimed

    The Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project rebuilds Wampanoag from the Eliot Bible and colonial documents, and a new generation of children grows up speaking it.

    Sources (1)
    • Hinton, Leanne, Leena Huss & Gerald Roche, eds. 2018. The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization. New York: Routledge.