Massachusett

Massachusett is the leading language of the Southern New England branch of Eastern Algonquian, a dialect chain that also covered the Wampanoag. The Pilgrims of the Mayflower met Wampanoag speakers in 1620 and made their peace with the sachem Massasoit the next year.

The Puritan minister John Eliot, who founded the first Indian praying town at Natick in 1651, translated the whole Bible into the Natick dialect. His Indian Bible of 1663 was the first Bible printed in North America and made Massachusett the first native language of the region with a body of written literature.

King Philip's War of 1675 to 1676, led by the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, shattered the praying towns and cost most of the region's peoples their lands; survivors who kept their speech carried it into a long, scattered decline through the eighteenth century.