Iroquoian

The Iroquoian languages are a family of indigenous languages of eastern North America, once spoken from the St. Lawrence Valley and the lower Great Lakes to the southern Appalachians. They are polysynthetic tongues, notable for having almost no labial consonants, and belonged to farming peoples who lived in fortified longhouse towns and grew maize, beans and squash.

The best-known speakers are the Haudenosaunee, or Five Nations, whose Great League of Peace was forged in present-day New York before European contact; the Tuscarora joined them as a sixth nation in 1722.

Their relatives included the Wendat, or Huron, the Neutral, Erie and Susquehannock, most of whom were dispersed or absorbed during the mid-seventeenth-century Beaver Wars. The Cherokee, isolated in the southern Appalachian Mountains, speak the sole major Iroquoian language of the American southeast.