Iroquoian

Iroquoian is the family of indigenous languages of eastern North America: its northern branches include the Six Nations tongues and Huron-Wyandot, while Cherokee forms its southern branch. The languages grouped here are less well-recorded northern branches outside the great confederacies.

Along the St. Lawrence, Laurentian was heard in Stadacona and Hochelaga when Jacques Cartier visited in 1535 and 1536; the Laurentian word canada, meaning village, passed into the name of the country. By the time Champlain arrived in 1608 its people had vanished, likely destroyed or driven off by Mohawk warfare.

Between lakes Ontario and Erie lived the Neutral, with some forty villages, until Haudenosaunee attacks dispersed them in 1651. Their kinsmen the Wenro had fled to the Wendat in 1638; south of Lake Erie the Erie were broken in the mid-1650s and adopted into the Seneca and other nations. These tongues survive in fragmentary missionary word lists.