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Extinct language of Florida, United States
The Calusa language is an unclassified language of southern Florida, United States that was spoken by the Calusa people.[2]
Circumstantial evidence, primarily from Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, suggests that all of the peoples of southern Florida and the Tampa Bay area, including the Tequesta, Mayaimi, and Tocobaga, as well as the Calusa, spoke dialects of a common language. This language was distinct from the languages of the Apalachee, Timucua, Mayaca, and Ais people in central and northern Florida.
Comparison with Tunica[edit]Julian Granberry (1994) has suggested that the Calusa language was related to the Tunica language of the lower Mississippi River Valley, with Calusa possibly being relatively a recent arrival from the lower Mississippi region. Another possibility was that similarities between the languages were derived from long-term mutual contact.[1][3]
Granberry (2011) provides the following inventory of Calusa phonemes.[4][1]
Consonants Labial Apical Palatal Velar Glottal Plosive p t tʃ k ʔ Fricative s h Rhotic r Nasal m n ɲ Lateral l Approximant w jA Calusa /s/ [s̠] sound is said to range between a /s/ to a /ʃ/ sound.
Vowels Front Central Back Close i u Close-mid e o Open-mid ɛ ɔ Open aLittle is known of the language of the Calusa. A dozen words for which translations were recorded and 50 or 60 place names form the entire known corpus of the language.
A few vocabulary examples from Granberry (2011) are listed below:[4]
(*) denotes earlier century Calusa language records.
Some Calusa words, proper nouns, and phrases from Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda's writings (including his 1575 memoir Memoria de las cosas y costa y indios de la Florida) that are cited in Zamponi (2024) include:[2]
Sipi is the name of a main idol in a Calusa temple, according to a 1743 report (Informe) by Fr. Joseph Xavier de Alaña that was sent to his superiors.[5]
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