“The Mohican language was a distinct dialect of the Algonquian language family and was spoken by as many as 12,000 people along the Hudson and Housatonic Rivers in the 17th and 18th centuries,” according to historian Lion G. Miles in Now & Then. “The last fluent speaker died in 1933. Closely related to the speech of the Delaware and Munsee peoples, Mohican is classified as a ‘polysynthetic language,’ with long complex words formed from affixes added to root stems.

Even written languages showed a great deal of variety in the spellings of specific words. Before the advent of a popular dictionary, literate persons spelled phonetically, which lead to the many variations of specific words we see in 18th century deeds, diaries, etc. The first popular English

dictionary was Samuel Johnson’s 1755 “Dictionery of the English Language”, but it was not until 1806 that Noah Webster published his American English dictionary.
— Lucianne Lavin

Miles explained, “There are 21 letters in Mohican and a vowel in every word. Nouns were classified as animate or inanimate. Verbs were inflected for mood, intensity, person, voice and tense. In its written form, Mohican did not use the letters F, L, R, X, or Z. Since native peoples generally had no written language, the spelling of words varies greatly, depending on the pronunciation of the speaker and the hearing of the person writing it down. Very few of the tribe were able to read their own language so the few translations were little used.”

“The original Mohican language was spoken widely throughout the tribe’s traditional homeland along the Hudson River, in southern Vermont, western Massachusetts and northwestern Connecticut…,” Miles wrote in Mohican News. “The Mohican language is the historical tongue spoken by the tribe for perhaps 10,000 years and its revival would be an important step in the restoration of the very heart of Mohican tribal culture.”

Miles developed a dictionary — available online — after examining translations of English catechism or German texts into Mohican.

— Bernard A. Drew