• Source: Calusa language

The Calusa language is an unclassified language of southern Florida, United States that was spoken by the Calusa people.




Background and classification


Little 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. 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.
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.




Phonology


Granberry (2011) provides the following inventory of Calusa phonemes.

A Calusa /s/ [s̠] sound is said to range between a /s/ to a /ʃ/ sound.




Known words and phrases


A few vocabulary examples from Granberry (2011) are listed below:

tepe 'join'
kuči 'destroy'
ñoka 'war'
ño 'village'
*śahka 'tree'
mayai 'on the other side'
(*) 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:

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.




Comparison with Tunica






See also


Indigenous people of the Everglades region




References

Kata Kunci Pencarian:

• Calusa language
• Calusa
• Calusa–Tunica languages
• Mayaimi
• Tequesta
• Languages of the United States
• Bidai language
• List of language families
• Tampa, Florida
• Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda