Mohawk ()Laurie Bauer, 2007, The Linguistics Student's Handbook, Edinburgh or (, ) is an Iroquoian language currently spoken by around 3,500 people of the Mohawk nation, located primarily in current or former Haudenosaunee territories, predominantly in Canada (southern Ontario and Quebec), and to a lesser extent in the United States (western and northern New York), although the historical center of the language was further south.
The word "Mohawk" is an exonym. In the Mohawk language, the people say that they are from ( or ) and that they are ( or ). The Mohawks were extremely wealthy traders, as other nations in their confederacy needed their flint for tool-making. Their Algonquian-speaking neighbors (and competitors), the People of Muh-heck Heek Ing or Mohicans, called the People of Kanien꞉ke "Maw Unk Lin" or 'Bear People'. The Dutch heard and wrote this name as "Mohawks" and so the People of Kanien꞉ke are often referred to as Mohawks. The Dutch also referred to the Mohawk as Egils or Maquas. The French adapted those terms as Aigniers or Maquis, or called them by the generic Iroquois.
History The Mohawks were the largest and most powerful of the original Five Nations, controlling a vast area of land on the eastern frontier of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. The Mohawk Valley, North Country, and Adirondack region of present-day Upstate New York constituted the greater part of the Mohawk-speaking area until the end of the 18th century.
Current status
The Mohawk language is currently classified as threatened, and the number of native speakers has continually declined over the past several years.
Mohawk has the largest number of speakers among the Northern Iroquoian languages, and today it is the only one with more than a thousand remaining speakers. At Ahkwesásne, residents have founded a language immersion school (pre-K to grade 8) in Kanienʼkéha to revive the language. With their children learning it, parents and other family members are taking language classes, too.
The radio station CKON-FM (97.3 on-air in Hogansburg, New York and Saint Regis, Quebec and widely available online through streaming), licensed by the Ahkwesáhsne Mohawk Nation, broadcasts portions of its programming in Kanienʼkéha. The call sign is a reference to the Mohawk word , which means "hello".
A Mohawk language immersion school was established. Mohawk parents, concerned with the lack of culture-based education in public and parochial schools, founded the Ahkwesásne Freedom School in 1979. Six years later, the school implemented a Mohawk language immersion curriculum based on a traditional cycle of fifteen seasonal ceremonies, and on the Mohawk Thanksgiving Address, or Ohén꞉ton Karihwatékwen, "The words before all else." Every morning, teachers and students gather in the hallway to recite the Thanksgiving Address in Mohawk.
An adult immersion program was also created in 1985 to address the issue of intergenerational fluency decline of the Mohawk language.http://mje.mcgill.ca/article/view/8645.
Kana'tsioharè:ke (meaning "place of the clean pot"), is a small Mohawk community on the north bank of the Mohawk River, west of Fonda, New York. Kana'tsioharè:ke was created to be a "Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Reverse", teaching Mohawk language and culture. Located at the ancient homeland of the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk), it was re-established in September 1993 under the leadership of Thomas R. Porter (, "The One Who Wins"). The community must raise their own revenue and frequently hold cultural presentations, workshops, and academic events, including an annual Strawberry Festival. A craft shop on site features genuine handmade Native crafts from all over North America.
The primary mission of the community is to try to preserve traditional values, culture, language and lifestyles in the guidance of the (Great Law of Peace). Kanatsiohareke, Inc. is a non-profit organization under IRS code 501(c)(3).
In 2006, over 600 people were reported to speak the language in Canada, many of them elderly.Statistics Canada, 2006 Census of Population, Statistics Canada catalogue no. 97-558-XCB2006015
Kahnawà:ke is located at a metropolitan location, near central Montreal, Quebec, Canada. As Kahnawà:ke is located near Montreal, many individuals speak both English and French, and this has contributed to a decline in the use of Mohawk language over the past century. The Mohawk Survival School, the first immersion program was established in 1979. The school's mission was to revitalize Mohawk language. To examine how successful the program had been, questionnaire was given to the Kahnawà:ke residents following the first year. The results indicated that teaching towards younger generation have been successful and showed an increase in the ability to speak the language in private settings, as well as an increase in the mixing of Mohawk in English conversations were found.http://www3.brandonu.ca/cjns/12.2/hoover.pdf.
Current number of speakers In 2011, there were approximately 3,500 speakers of Mohawk, primarily in Quebec, Ontario and western New York.Moseley, Christopher and R. E. Asher, ed. Atlas of World Languages (New York: Routelege, 1994) p. 7 Immersion (monolingual) classes for young children at Ahkwesásne and other reserves are helping to train new first-language speakers. The importance of immersion classes among parents grew after the passage of Bill 101, and in 1979 the Mohawk Survival School was established to facilitate language training at the high school level. Kahnawà:ke and Kanaʼtsioharè:ke offer immersion classes for adults. In the 2016 Canadian census, 875 people said Mohawk was their only mother tongue.
Usage in popular culture Mohawk dialogue features prominently in Ubisoft Montreal's 2012 action-adventure open world video game Assassin's Creed III, through the game's main character, the half-Mohawk, half-Welsh Ratonhnhaké꞉ton, also called Connor, and members of his native Kanièn꞉ke village around the times of the American Revolution. Ratonhnhaké꞉ton was voiced and modelled by Crow actor Noah Bulaagawish Watts. Hiawatha, the leader of the Iroquoian civilization in Sid Meier's Civilization V, voiced by Kanentokon Hemlock, speaks Mohawk.
The stories of Mohawk language learners are also chronicled in 'Raising The Words', a short documentary film released in 2016 that explores personal experiences with Mohawk language revitalization in Tyendinaga, a Mohawk community roughly 200 kilometres east of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The film was set to be shown at the 4th annual Ethnografilm festival in Paris, France.
The Mohawk language is used in the 2017 film Mohawk, the 1991 film Black Robe, the 1990 film The Company of Strangers, and the 2020 television series Barkskins.
The language was used throughout in the Marvel Studios animated series What If...?, in the season 2 episode "What If... Kahhori Reshaped the World?", where they introduce an original Mohawk superhero named Kahhori.
Dialects Mohawk has three major dialects: Western ( and ), Central (), and Eastern ( and ); the differences between them are largely phonological. These are related to the major Mohawk territories since the eighteenth century. The pronunciation of and several consonant clusters may differ in the dialects.
PhonologyWesternCentralEasternsevennineI falldog
Phonology
The phoneme inventory of Mohawk is as follows (using the International Phonetic Alphabet).
Consonants A typologically uncommon feature of Mohawk (and Iroquoian) phonology is that there are no labials (m, p, b, f, v), except in a few adoptions from French and English, where and appear (e.g., "matches" and "Abraham"); these sounds are late additions to Mohawk phonology and were introduced after widespread European contact.
+Mohawk Consonants Dental Palatal Velar Glottal Nasal Plosive () () Affricate Fricative () Approximant /
Consonant clusters The Central () dialect has the following consonant clusters. All clusters can occur word-medially; those on a tinted background can also occur word-initially.
1st↓ · 2nd→ t k s h l n d͡ʒ j w t tt tk ts th k kt kk ks kh kw ʔ ʔt ʔk ʔs ʔl ʔn ʔd͡ʒ ʔj ʔw s st sk ss sh sl sn sj sw h ht hk hs hl hn hd͡ʒ hj hw l lh lj n nh nl nj d͡ʒ d͡ʒj w wh
Note that /th/ and /sh/ are pronounced individually in consonant clusters, not single sounds like in English ⟨th⟩ and ⟨sh⟩ in thing and she.
Consonant voicing The consonants and the clusters are pronounced voiced before any voiced sound (i.e. a vowel or ). They are voiceless at the end of a word or before a voiceless sound. is voiced word initially and between vowels.
"car" "that" "still"
Vowels FrontCentralBackHigh Mid Low
Mohawk has oral and nasalized vowels; four vowel qualities occur in oral phonemes , and two only occur as nasalized vowels (). Vowels can be long or short.
Suprasegmentals Stress, length, and tone
Mohawk words have both stress and tone, and it can be classified as a restricted tone system (aka pitch-accent system). Stressed vowels carry one of four tonal configurations, two of which are contour tones: high, low, rising and falling tones. Contour tones only occur in syllables with long vowels. High tone usually appears in closed syllables containing a short vowel, or before . It is written with an acute accent: , . Rising tone generally occurs in open syllables. It is written with a combination acute accent and colon: /kaˈnáːta/ , /ˈrṹːkwe/ . Notice that when it is one of the nasal vowels which is long, the colon appears after the . Long-falling tone is the result of the word stress falling on a vowel which comes before a or + a consonant (there may be, of course, exceptions to this and other rules). The underlying or reappears when stress is placed elsewhere. It is written with a grave accent and colon: .
Orthography
Mohawk orthography was standardized in 1993. The orthography uses the following letters: ⟨Aa Ee Hh Ii Kk Ll Nn Oo Rr Ss Tt Ww Yy⟩ and . It uses diacritics for tone, stress, and vowel duration, along with three digraphs: ⟨ts en on⟩ for /d͡ʒ ʌ̃ ũ/, respectively.
The standard allows for some variation of how the language is represented, and the clusters , , and are written as pronounced in each community. The orthography matches the phonological analysis as above except: The glottal stop is written with an apostrophe , but is often omitted at the end of words, especially in Eastern dialect where it is typically not pronounced.
Written in the Eastern dialect (reflecting pronunciation), as in "seven". Written in the Central dialect, as in "seven". Written in the Western dialect, as in "seven".
Typically written with in the Central and Eastern dialects, as in "six". Typically written with a in the Western dialect, as in "six". The nasalized vowel is written as , as in "one". The nasalized vowel is written , as in "eight". In cases where the vowel or is followed by an in the same syllable, the is written with an under-macron diacritic: "I am closing a door". If the did not have the diacritic, the sequence would be pronounced . Another convention is to write the nasal vowel with an ogonek, e.g. . The low-macron accent is not a part of standard orthography and is not used in the Central or Eastern dialects. In standard orthography, is written before to create the or : 'I am closing it'.
Grammar
Mohawk words tend to be longer on average than words in English, primarily because they consist of a large number of morphemes.
Mohawk expresses a number of distinctions on its pronominal elements: person (1st, 2nd, 3rd), number (singular, dual, plural), gender (masculine, feminine/indefinite, feminine/neuter) and inclusivity/exclusivity on the first person dual and plural. Pronominal information is encoded in prefixes on the verbs; separate pronoun words are used for emphasis. There are three main paradigms of pronominal prefixes: subjective (with dynamic verbs), objective (with stative verbs), and transitive.