page_title: Wampanoag
section_title: Language revival
hierarchical_section_title: Wampanoag / Language revival
caption_attribution_description: English: Title page of the 1663 first edition of John Eliot's translation of the Holy Bible.
context_page_description: The Wampanoag, also rendered Wôpanâak, are a Native American people. They were a loose confederation of several tribes in the 17th century, but today Wampanoag people encompass five officially recognized tribes. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head in Massachusetts are federally recognized, and the Herring Pond, Assawompsett-Nemasket Band of Wampanoags, and Pocasset Wampanoag Tribe are recognized by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. They lived in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island in the beginning of the 17th century, at the time of first contact with the English colonists, a territory that included the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Their population numbered in the thousands; 3,000 Wampanoag lived on Martha's Vineyard alone.
  From 1615 to 1619, the Wampanoag suffered an epidemic, long suspected to be smallpox. Modern research, however, has suggested that it may have been leptospirosis, a bacterial infection which can develop into Weil's syndrome. It caused a high fatality rate and decimated the Wampanoag population.
context_section_description: The Wampanoag originally spoke Wôpanâak, a dialect of the Massachusett language which belongs to the Algonquian languages family. The first Bible published in America was a 1663 translation into Wampanoag by missionary John Eliot. He created an orthography which he taught to the Wampanoag. Many became literate, using Wampanoag for letters, deeds, and historic documents.
  The rapid decline of Wampanoag speakers began after the American Revolution. Neal Salisbury and Colin G. Calloway suggest that New England Indian communities suffered from gender imbalances at this time due to premature male deaths, especially due to warfare and their work in whaling and shipping. They posit that many Wampanoag women married outside their linguistic groups, making it difficult for them to maintain the various Wampanoag dialects.
  Some Wampanoag have been working on a language revival since 1993. The Wôpanâak (Wampanoag) Language Reclamation Project is a collaboration of several tribes and bands led by Jessie Little Doe Baird. They have taught some children, who have become the first speakers of Wôpanâak in more than 100 years. The project is training teachers to reach more children and to develop a curriculum for a Wôpanâak-based school. Baird has developed a 10,000-word Wôpanâak-English dictionary by consulting archival Wôpanâak documents and using linguistic methods to reconstruct unattested words, also having produced a grammar, collections of stories, and other books.
caption: Title page of the first Bible printed in the United States, translated in the Massachusett language by John Eliot
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