Beothuk (/biːˈɒtək/ or /ˈbeɪ.əθʊk/), also called Beothukan, is an extinct language once spoken by the indigenous Beothuk people of Newfoundland. The Beothuk have been extinct since 1829, and there are few written accounts of their language. Hence, little is known about it, with practically no structural data existing for Beothuk.
Claims of links with the neighbouring Algonquian language family date back at least to Robert Gordon Latham in 1862. From 1968 onwards, John Hewson has put forth evidence of sound correspondences and shared morphology with Proto-Algonquian and other better-documented Algonquian languages. If this is valid, Beothuk would be an extremely divergent member of the family.[1]
Other researchers claimed that proposed similarities are more likely the result of borrowing than cognates.[2] The limited and poor nature of the documentation means there is not enough evidence to draw strong conclusions.[3] Owing to this overall lack of meaningful evidence, Ives Goddard and Lyle Campbell claim that any connections between Beothuk and Algonquian are unknown and likely unknowable.[4]
In 1910, American anthropologist Frank Speck recorded a 74-year-old native woman named Santu Toney singing a song purported to be in the language. The recording resurfaced at the very end of the 20th century. Some sources give the year 1929, but the 1910 date is confirmed in Speck's book Beothuk and Micmac (New York 1922, p. 67). The words are hard to hear and not understood. Santu said she had been taught the song by her father, which may be evidence that one person with a Beothuk connection was alive after the death of Shanawdithit in 1829 since Santu Toney was born about 1835). Contemporary researchers have tried to make a transcription of the song and to clean up the recording with modern methods. Native groups have learned the song.[5]
James P. Howley, Director of the Geological Survey of Newfoundland, who for more than forty years was interested in the history of the Beothuk, doubted (in 1914) the truthfulness of Santu Toney.[6]
Beothuk is known only from several wordlists from the 18th and the 19th centuries by George C. Pulling (1792),[7] Rev. John Clinch, Rev. John Leigh, and Hercules Robinson (1834).[8] They contain more than 400 words that had been collected from speakers such as Oubee, Demasduit, and Shanawdithit, but there were no examples of connected speech. Wordlists had also been collected by W. E. Cormack (who worked with Shanawdithit), Richard King (whose wordlist had been passed on to Robert Gordon Latham[9]), and James P. Howley (1915)[10] (who worked with Jure, a widow from the islands of the Bay of Exploits).[11]
The lack of any systematic or consistent representation of the vocabulary in the wordlists makes it daunting to establish the sound system of Beothuk, and words that are listed separately on the lists may be the same word transcribed in different ways. Moreover, the lists are known to have many mistakes. That, along with the lack of connected speech leaves little upon which to build any reconstruction of Beothuk.
The wordlists have been transcribed and analyzed in Hewson (1978). The combined Beothuk wordlists below have been reproduced from Hewson (1978: 149–167).[11]
Numerals in Beothuk:[11]
Months in Beothuk:[11]
Below is a comparison of Beothuk words from Hewson (1978) with Proto-Algonquian lexical reconstructions from Hewson (2017).[12]
The prehistoric cnidarian animal Haootia takes its name from the Beothuk word for "demon".[13]
