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- The phonology of the Massachusett language was re-introduced to the Mashpee, Aquinnah, Herring Pond and Assonet tribes that participate in the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, co-founded by Jessie Little Doe Baird in 1993. The phonology is based regular sound changes that took place in the development of Proto-Eastern Algonquian from Proto-Algonquian, as well as cues in the colonial orthography regarding pronunciation, as the writing system was based on English pronunciation and spelling conventions in use at the time, keeping in mind differences in late seventeenth century English versus today. Other resources included information from extant Algonquian languages with native speakers. The Massachusett language is an eastern branch Algonquian language within the Algic language family. It was historically spoken by the Massachusett people of Greater Boston, the Pawtucket of southernmost Maine, coastal New Hampshire and the lower Merrimack River watershed, the Wampanoag of southeastern Massachusetts but specifically Cape Cod and the Islands and portions of Rhode Island, the Nauset (possibly a Wampanoag sub-group) of the outer Cape and the Coweset of north-western Rhode Island, and likely spread as a common second language to many Nipmuc and Pennacook speaking groups. In a simplified Pidgin form, it was a common medium of intertribal communication across most of New England and Long Island. The historical phonology of the language is hampered by the dormancy of the language with the death of the last speakers at the end of the nineteenth century as well as dialect leveling. Since the Bible and most of the missionary translations were based on the dialect of the Massachusett people, specifically its Natick variety, that form gained prestige. The use of Natick as a training center for Indian missionaries and teachers, who were literate and often drawn from Natick's local families, helped spread the prestige of the particular variety, so that most dialectal differences were quickly lost. Dialects certainly existed given the diversity of peoples that used it and its broad distribution. (en)
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| rdfs:comment
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- The phonology of the Massachusett language was re-introduced to the Mashpee, Aquinnah, Herring Pond and Assonet tribes that participate in the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, co-founded by Jessie Little Doe Baird in 1993. The phonology is based regular sound changes that took place in the development of Proto-Eastern Algonquian from Proto-Algonquian, as well as cues in the colonial orthography regarding pronunciation, as the writing system was based on English pronunciation and spelling conventions in use at the time, keeping in mind differences in late seventeenth century English versus today. Other resources included information from extant Algonquian languages with native speakers. (en)
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