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Iroquoian languages
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Iroquoian languages

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Erminnie Adele Platt Smith

Iroquoian languages, family of about 16 North American Indian languages aboriginally spoken around the eastern Great Lakes and in parts of the Middle Atlantic states and the South. Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, all originally spoken in New York, along with Tuscarora (originally spoken in North Carolina) and Cherokee (originally spoken in the southern Appalachians), are still spoken. No native speakers are known for the other Iroquoian languages, some long extinct. With the exception of Huron and Wyandot, the extinct languages are poorly documented. Iroquoian languages are remarkable for their grammatical intricacy. Much of a sentence’s semantic content is bound around a verbal base, so a single very long word may constitute a fairly complex utterance.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.