Categories: Language families | Iroquoian languages

Iroquoian languages

The Iroquoian languages are a Native American language family. The family includes the languages of the Iroquois Confederacy (including the extinct Mingo language), as well as Cherokee.

Every language in this family has at least one nasal vowel phoneme. Cherokee's is a nasal schwa, written in transliteration as 'v' (e.g. "Hv?" sounds like "Huh?" nasalized, and means the same thing).

The Iroquois were made up of a group or league of tribes that settled much of the land which presently spans from western New York to western Ohio. They were not nomadic but preferred to live in villages with houses built of saplings and bark or thatch commonly called long houses. Food such as corn, squash, beans, and other crops were cultivated and stored in various types of pottery jars. Excavated grains, pottery and other evidence suggests that a typical Indian meal consisted of soup made from different plants and animals, with corn as a staple in their diets.

Some linguists group the Iroquoian languages with the Siouan languages as the Macro-Siouan family, but this larger family is not recognized by a consensus of linguists.