Seneca language

Seneca is the language of the Seneca people, one of the Six Nations of the Hodinöhsö꞉niʼ ; it is an Iroquoian language, spoken at the time of contact in the western part of New York. While the name Seneca, attested as early as the seventeenth century, is of obscure origins, the endonym Onödowáʼga꞉ translates to "those of the big hill." About 10,000 Seneca live in the United States and Canada, primarily on reservations in western New York, with others living in Oklahoma and near Brantford, Ontario. Since 2022 an active language revitalization program has been underway.

Classification and history

Seneca is an Iroquoian language spoken by the Seneca people, one of the members of the Iroquois Five Nations confederacy. It is most closely related to the other Five Nations Iroquoian languages, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk.
Seneca is first attested in two damaged dictionaries produced by the French Jesuit missionary Julien Garnier around the turn of the eighteenth century. It is clear from these documents, and from early nineteenth century Seneca writings, that the eighteenth century saw an extremely high degree of phonological change, such that the Seneca collected by Garnier would likely be mutually unintelligible with modern Seneca. Moreover, as these sound changes appear to be unique to Seneca, they have had the effect of making Seneca highly phonologically divergent from the languages most closely related to it, as well as making the underlying morphological richness of the language incredibly opaque. Today, Seneca is spoken primarily in western New York, on three reservations, Allegany, Cattaraugus, and Tonawanda, and in Ontario, on the Grand River Six Nations Reserve. While the speech community has dwindled to approximately one hundred native speakers, revitalization efforts are underway.

Language revitalization

In 1998, the Seneca Faithkeepers School was founded as a five-day-a week school to teach children the Seneca language and tradition. The School has published language learning tools and courses on the language-learning platform Memrise broken out by topic.
In 2010, K-5 Seneca language teacher Anne Tahamont received recognition for her work with students at Silver Creek School and in language documentation, presenting "Documenting the Seneca Language' using a Recursive Bilingual Education Framework" at the International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation.
As of summer 2012,

The fewer than 50 native speakers of the Seneca Nation of Indians' language would agree that it is in danger of becoming extinct. Fortunately, a $200,000 federal grant for the Seneca Language Revitalization Program has further solidified a partnership with Rochester Institute of Technology that will help develop a user-friendly computer catalogue allowing future generations to study and speak the language.
The revitalization program grant, awarded to RIT's Native American Future Stewards Program, is designed to enhance usability of the Seneca language.

The project will develop "a user-friendly, web-based dictionary or guide to the Seneca language." "Robbie Jimerson, a graduate student in RIT's computer science program and resident of the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation near Buffalo," who is working on the project, commented: "My grandfather has always said that a joke is funnier in Seneca than it is in English." As of January 2013, a Seneca language app was under development.
As of fall 2012, Seneca language learners are partnering with fluent mentors, and a newsletter, Gae꞉wanöhgeʼ! Seneca Language Newsletter, is available online.
Although former Seneca-owned radio station WGWE broadcast primarily in English, it featured a daily "Seneca Word of the Day" feature before each noon newscast, broadcast a limited amount of Seneca-language music, and made occasional use of the Seneca language in its broadcasts in a general effort to increase awareness of the Seneca language by the general public.
In 2013, the first public sports event was held in the Seneca language, when middle school students served as announcers for a lacrosse match.

Phonology

Seneca words are written with 13 letters, three of which can be umlauted, plus the letter colon and the acute accent mark. Seneca language is generally written in all-lowercase, and capital letters are only used rarely, even then only for the first letter of a word; all-caps is never used, even on road signs. The vowels and consonants are a, ä, e, ë, i, o, ö, h, j, k, n, s, t, w, y, and ʼ. In some transliterations, t is replaced by d, and likewise k by g; Seneca does not have a phonemic differentiation between voiced and voiceless consonants. The letter j can also be replaced by the three-letter combination tsy.

Consonants

As per Wallace Chafe's 2015 grammar of Seneca, the consonantal and non-vocalic inventory of Seneca is as follows. Note that orthographic representations of these sounds are given in angled brackets where different from the IPA transcription.

Resonants

is a palatal semivowel. After, it is voiceless and spirantized. After, it is voiceless, in free variation with a spirant allophone. After or, it is voiced and optionally spirantized, in free variation with a spirant allophone. Otherwise it is voiced and not spirantized.
is a velar semivowel. It is weakly rounded.
is a released apico-alveolar nasal.

Obstruents

is an apico-alveolar stop. It is voiceless and aspirated before an obstruent or an open juncture. It is voiced and released before a vowel and resonant.
is a dorso-velar stop. It is voiceless and aspirated before an obstruent or open juncture. It is voiced and released before a vowel or resonant.
is a spirant with blade-alveolar groove articulation. It is always voiceless, and is fortified to everywhere except between vowels. It is palatalized to before, and lenited to intervocalically.
is a voiced postalveolar affricate, and is a voiced alveolar affricate. Before, it is optionally palatalized in free variation with. Nevertheless, among younger speakers, it appears as though and are in the process of merging to.
Similarly, is a voiceless postalveolar affricate, and is a voiceless alveolar affricate.

Laryngeal obstruents

is a voiceless segment colored by an immediately preceding and/or following vowel and/or resonant.
is a glottal stop, written and commonly substituted with ASCII.

Vowels

The vowels can be subclassified into the oral vowels,,,, and, and the nasalized vowels and. Of these vowels, is relatively rare, an innovation not shared with other Five Nations Iroquoian languages; even rarer is, a vowel only used to describe unusually small objects. Note that orthographic representations of these sounds are given in angled brackets where different from the IPA transcription.

	Front	Back
Close
Close-mid
Open-mid	⟨ë⟩	⟨ö⟩
Open	⟨ä⟩	⟨a⟩

The orthography described here is the one used by the Seneca Bilingual Education Project.
The nasal vowels, and, are transcribed with tremas on top:. Depending on the phonetic environment, the nasal vowel may vary between and, whereas may vary from to. Long vowels are indicated with a following, while stress is indicated with an acute accent over the top. is transcribed as.

Oral vowels

is a high front vowel.
is a high-mid front vowel. Its high allophone occurs in postconsonantal position before or an oral obstruent. Its low allophone occurs in all other environments.
is a low front vowel.
is a low back vowel. Its high allophone occurs in postconsonantal position before,,, or an oral obstruent. Its low allophone occurs in all other environments. Before or, it is nasalized.
is a mid back vowel. It is weakly rounded. Its high allophone occurs in postconsonantal position before or an oral obstruent. Its low allophone occurs in all other environments.
is a rounded high back vowel. It has also, however, been recorded as unrounded.

Nasal vowels

is a low-mid front vowel. It is nasalized.
is a low back vowel. It is weakly rounded and nasalized.

Diphthongs

The following oral diphthongs occur in Seneca: ae, ai, ao, ea, ei, eo, oa, oe, and oi.
The following nasal diphthongs occur as well: aö, eö, and oë.

Prosody

is marked with a colon, and open juncture by word space. Long vowels generally occur in one of two environments: 1. In even-numbered word-penultimate syllables not followed by a laryngeal stop; and 2. In odd-numbered penultimate syllables that A. are followed by only one non-vocalic segment before the succeeding vowel, B. are not followed by a laryngeal stop, and C. do not contain the vowel . Moreover, vowels are often lengthened compensitorally as the reflex of a short vowel and an glottal segment.
Stress is either strong, marked with an acute accent mark, or weak, which is unmarked. Seneca accented short vowels are typically higher in pitch than their unaccented counterparts, while accented long vowels have been recorded as having a falling pitch. Short vowels are typically accented in a trochaic pattern, when they appear in even-numbered syllables preceding A. a laryngeal obstruent, B. a cluster of non-vocalic segments, or C. an odd-numbered syllable containing either A or B. There does not appear to be any upper or lower limit on how many such syllables can be accented – every even-numbered syllable in a word can be accented, but none need be accented. Syllables can also be stressed by means of accent spreading, if an unaccented vowel is followed immediately by a stressed vowel. Additionally, word-initial and word-final syllables are underlyingly unaccented, although they can be given sentence level stress.