A Year in Language, Day 245: Mohawk Mohawk is an Iroquoian language, the largest after Cherokee. It is spoken by some 3-4,000 people mostly around the nexus of New York State, Ontario, and Quebec. The Mohawk were once among, if not the, most powerful of the 5 nations that formed the Iroquoi Confederacy, one of the great powers of what would become New England. The word “Mohawk” comes from the Dutch interpretation of the word from one of the neighboring Athabascan speaking peoples, likely Mohican. It likely meant “cannibal” as the Athabascans and Iroquois were enemies, and the Mohawk, as the nation who protected the border, were considered fearsome. The Mohawk language does not even have an “m” sound. The Mohawk word for themselves is “Kanien’kéha” which means “of the Flint place” Not only does Mohawk lack an /m/, it lacks all labial (/p/, /f/) consonants, a peculiarity of Iroquois languages. Like many indigenous language Mohawk is polysynthetic, meaning it can create compound words with meanings akin to full sentences in other languages. One of the ways it does this is “noun incorporation”. As the name implies this is a grammatical and phonetic process of incorporating the noun, normally the object, into the verb. In English this would be like if you had the sentence “I ate pie” and could alter it to “I pie-ate”. Mohawk also exhibits polypersonal agreement, meaning the verb agrees with the subject and object. This is common in African Bantu languages as well, though in those language the subject and object are represented by two prefixes on the verb. In Mohawk there is a unique prefix for every possible combination of subject and object, one for “I-him”, another for “I-you”, a third for “You-him” and so on. Fun trivia: Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, became very well acquainted with Mohawk language and people, and created early transcriptions for the previously unwritten language. For this he was made an honorary Mohawk chief.
