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Nottoway
Native to	United States
Region	Virginia
Ethnicity	Nottoway,Meherrin
Extinct	1838, with the death ofEdith Turner
Revival	[1]
Language family	Iroquoian Northern Tuscarora–Nottoway Nottoway
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Either: ntw – Nottoway nwy – Nottoway-Meherrin
Linguist List	nwy Nottoway-Meherrin
Glottolog	nott1246  Nottoway mehe1242  Meherrin
Pre-contact distribution of the Nottoway language

Nottoway/ˈnɒtəˌweɪ/, also calledCheroenhaka andNottoway-Meherrin, was an extinct language spoken by theMeherrin andNottoway peoples. Nottoway is closely related toTuscarora within theIroquoian language family. Two tribes of Nottoway are recognized by the state ofVirginia: the Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia and the Cheroenhaka (Nottoway) Indian Tribe. Other Nottoway descendants live inWisconsin andCanada, where some of their ancestors fled in the 18th century. The last known speaker,Edith Turner, died in 1838. The Nottoway people are undertaking work for language revival.^[2]

Knowledge of Nottoway comes primarily from a word list collected on March 4, 1820. Former PresidentThomas Jefferson’s handwritten letter toPeter S. Du Ponceau, on July 7, 1820, states that a Nottoway Indian vocabulary was obtained on March 4th, 1820 from Edith Turner, styled as their “Queen,” byJohn Wood, a former Professor of Mathematics at theCollege of William and Mary.^[3] Du Ponceau recognized the language immediately as Iroquoian, writing that he was "struck as well as astonished at its decided Iroquois Physiognomy."^[4]Blair A. Rudes (1981) concluded that Nottoway is a distinct language from Tuscarora, but closest to Tuscarora within Iroquoian.^[5]

In addition to the vocabulary collected by John Wood, a few additional words were gathered byJames Trezvant.^[6]

By comparing words in Wood’s vocabulary with cognates in other Iroquoian languages, Blair Rudes (1981) was able to reconstruct the phonemes of Nottoway. According to Rudes, Nottoway has five vowelphonemes as seen in the following table.^[5]: 46 These symbols, which Rudes uses in his transcriptions, are consistent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Note that the mid central vowel isnasalized.

Examples of these vowels are shown in the following table (from the Wood vocabulary).^[5]: 31 Wood's spelling of Nottoway was based on English and was therefore not systematic. A comparison to Tuscaroracognates in the rightmost column, however, provides evidence of Wood's intended vowel sound.

Nottoway has ten consonant phonemes, listed in the table below. Like the vowels, these consonant phonemes were reconstructed by Rudes using John Wood's vocabulary and knowledge of related languages.^[5] Most of the symbols that Rudes uses are the same as the IPA symbols. Where they differ, the IPA symbol is included in square brackets. The three labial consonants are in parentheses because these phonemes are only present in five words of the language, none of which are of Iroquoian descent. The letter ‘m’ also sometimes occurs at the end of a word after a vowel, but this is to indicate nasalization of the previous vowel, not the presence of the phoneme /m/.^[5]: 29

The following table shows example words with each of these consonants (also from the Wood vocabulary).^[5]: 31 Comparison to related languages (primarily Tuscarora) allowed Rudes to reconstruct some of the consonant phonemes (in bold).

The English-based spelling Wood used makes it difficult to determine syllable structure. Most words, however, are consistent with thesyllable structure (C)V(C)(C):

An exception is words that begin with /kw/ (which may have been a complex segment):

There is also limited evidence that words could end in three consonants:

Consonant clusters must include /w/ or /s/, and possibly /n/. /w/ is the most common, but /s/ is still regularly seen in words likeWhisk 'five'. The status of /n/ is uncertain since Wood used⟨n⟩ to representnasal vowels.

Aside fromWhisk 'five', most content words are multisyllabic.

Rudes (1981) notes that Nottoway has two series of pronominal prefixes used forinalienable and alienable possession. Inalienable nouns, such as body parts, are possessed with the prefixge- 'my':ge-snunke 'my hand',ge-tunke 'my belly'. Alienable nouns are possessed with the prefixak- 'my':ak-uhor '(my) old man',aqu-eianha '(my) boy'. These two series of pronominal prefixes are also used on verbs, where they indicate the agent and patient, respectively. The full set of prefixes is listed in the table below.^{[5]: 38–39}

In addition to the possessive prefixes, Rudes identifies a number of other affixes appearing in the Wood vocabulary.^{[5]: 37–42} They are as follows:

Most of the written Nottoway materials are vocabularies rather than texts, so scholars can only make limited assumptions about the syntactic structure of the language. However, Rudes (1981) explains three syntactic characteristics that are supported by recorded Nottoway evidence:

1. The definite article precedes a noun, as in Tuscarora.

2. Of two adjacent nouns, the first noun modifies the second.

3. An adjective follows the noun it modifies, and most likely could also precede it.

Rudes tentatively reconstructs noun incorporation based on these examples:

The following vocabulary is from Wood as cited in Rudes from the version Jefferson sent to Du Ponceau.^{[5]: 30–31, 46–48}

Rudes attributes the following words to a vocabulary byJ. N. B. Hewitt.^[7][5]: 48 It may be a later version of the one gathered by Trezvant.

• Northern Iroquoian languages
• Extinct languages of North America
• Nottoway
• Meherrin

• Language articles citing Ethnologue 26
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Pages with non-English text lacking appropriate markup from October 2024
• Language articles with Linglist code
• Language articles with unreferenced extinction date
• Pages with interlinear glosses using two unnamed parameters