Seneca (; in Seneca, , or ) is the language of the Seneca people, one of the Six Nations of the (Iroquois League); 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 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. As of 2013, an active language revitalization program is underway.
Classification and history
Seneca is an Iroquoian language spoken by the Seneca people, one of the members of the Iroquois Five (later, Six) Nations confederacy. It is most closely related to the other Five Nations Iroquoian languages, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk (and among those, it is most closely related to Cayuga).
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.
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 (see below in Phonology 2.1: Consonants). The letter j can also be replaced by the three-letter combination tsy. (For example, a creek in the town of Coldspring, New York, and the community near it, bears a name that can be transliterated as either or .)
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
/j/ is a palatal semivowel. After [s] it is voiceless and spirantized [ç]. After [h] it is voiceless , in free variation with a spirant allophone [ç]. After [t] or [k] it is voiced and optionally spirantized [j], in free variation with a spirant allophone . Otherwise it is voiced and not spirantized [j].
/w/ is a velar semivowel. It is weakly rounded [w].
/n/ is a released apico-alveolar nasal [n̺].
Obstruents
/t/ is an apico-alveolar stop [t̺]. It is voiceless and aspirated [t̺ʰ] before an obstruent or an open juncture (but is hardly audible between a nasalized vowel and open juncture). It is voiced and released [d̺] before a vowel and resonant.
/k/ is a dorso-velar stop [k]. It is voiceless and aspirated [kʰ] before an obstruent or open juncture. It is voiced and released [g] before a vowel or resonant.
/s/ is a spirant with blade-alveolar groove articulation [s]. It is always voiceless, and is fortified to [s˰] everywhere except between vowels. It is palatalized to [ʃ] before [j], and lenited to [s˯] intervocalically.
/dʒ/ is a voiced postalveolar affricate [dʒ], and /dz/ a voiced alveolar affricate [dz]. Before [i] it is optionally palatalized [dz] in free variation with [d͡ʑ]. Nevertheless, among younger speakers, it appears as though /dʒ/ and /dz/ are in the process of merging to [dʒ].
Similarly, /tʃ/ is a voiceless postalveolar affricate [tʃ], and /ts/ a voiceless alveolar affricate [ts].
Laryngeal obstruents
/h/ is a voiceless segment [h] colored by an immediately preceding and/or following vowel and/or resonant.
/ʔ/ is a glottal stop [ʔ], written and commonly substituted with ASCII .