Wampanoag (Wôpanâak)

Wôpanâak — also called Wampanoag or, in older scholarship, Massachusett — is an Eastern Algonquian language of the Southern New England Algonquian group, spoken across southeastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. It was the language of the people who watched the Mayflower arrive in 1620, of the Pokanoket sachem Ousamequin (Massasoit), and of Tisquantum (Squanto), the Patuxet man who served as interpreter between the Wampanoag and the Plymouth colonists. At contact the language was spoken by tens of thousands of people across dozens of communities.

What sets Wôpanâak apart from most silenced languages is the depth of its written record. In 1663 the Puritan missionary John Eliot, working with Native translators including the Nipmuc convert Job Nesutan and the printer’s assistant James Printer (Wowaus), published the Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God — the first complete Bible printed anywhere in the Americas, set entirely in the Massachusett language. Around it accumulated a remarkable archive: catechisms, primers, and thousands of pages of deeds, wills, petitions, and letters written by Wampanoag people themselves in their own language and Roman-alphabet orthography.

The loss of fluent speech was gradual, the product of two centuries of dispossession, epidemic disease, the devastation of King Philip’s War (1675-76), confinement to praying towns, and relentless pressure to assimilate into an English-speaking colony. By the middle of the 19th century there were effectively no fluent speakers left; the language survived longest on Martha’s Vineyard, where Tamsen Weekes, who died in 1890, is often named among the last to have spoken it.

For nearly a century and a half the language was dormant, alive only on paper. Then in 1993 Jessie Little Doe Baird, a Mashpee Wampanoag citizen, launched the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project. Drawing on the very documents the colonial project had produced, and trained in linguistics at MIT, she reconstructed the language and in 2004 raised her daughter Mae as its first native speaker in seven generations. Wôpanâak is today a language with children growing up in it again.