Wendat

Wendat, a name meaning dwellers on an island, is often called Huron in French sources; that nickname referred to the bristling hairstyle of its speakers. It was the language of the Wendat Confederacy in Huronia, between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay, maize farmers who lived in bark longhouses, with the related Tionontati or Petun people to their west.

Recollet and Jesuit missionaries learned and wrote the language from the 1620s, leaving dictionaries and grammars, and in 1643 Jean de Brébeuf composed the Huron Carol in Wendat.

Epidemics and defeat by the Haudenosaunee in the Beaver Wars of 1648 to 1650 shattered the confederacy: some refugees settled under French protection at Wendake near Quebec, while others merged with the Tionontati to become the Wyandot.