Haudenosaunee

Haudenosaunee denotes the Northern Iroquoian tongues of the Iroquois Confederacy and its neighbours in the north-eastern woodlands. The five original nations across New York were the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca; the Tuscarora were admitted as a sixth in 1722. The league was forged before European contact under the Great Law of Peace, and these languages were carried by oral tradition, ceremony and the Grand Council's formal oratory.

During the Beaver Wars of the 1600s the Haudenosaunee defeated and absorbed the Huron, Neutral, Erie and most of the Susquehannock. The latter's speech died in the eighteenth century; a vocabulary taken down by a Swedish missionary in the 1640s is nearly all that survives.

Missionaries gave the surviving confederacy languages Latin-based spellings. The American Revolution split the Six Nations, and many families resettled on the Grand River in Ontario after 1783.