Catawba (/kəˈtɔːbə/) is one of two Eastern Siouan languages of the eastern US, which together with the Western Siouan languages formed the Siouan language family.
The last native, fluent speaker of Catawba was Samuel Taylor Blue, who died in 1959.[3] The Catawba people are now working to revitalize and preserve the Catawba language.
A Catawba alphabet was created by the Catawba Language Project for the Catawba language, as part of a revitalization effort for the language and the creation of an app for it. [1][further explanation needed]
Some Catawba lexicon is presented below.
Red Thunder Cloud, an impostor, born Cromwell Ashbie Hawkins West, claimed to be Catawba and the last speaker of the Catawba language. He was promoted by anthropologist Frank Speck, who introduced West to the Catawba community. The Catawba told Speck that West was not Catawba, but Speck ignored them and continued to promote West and include him in his work, even recommending him as an expert to other anthropologists. (Speck is also the source of the theory that Catawba is a Siouan language; at one time he also insisted that the Cherokee language is Siouan.) At his death in 1996 it was revealed that West was neither Catawba nor even Native American, but had learned what he knew of the language from books, and from listening to the last known native speaker, Samuel Taylor Blue and his half-sister, Sally Gordon, when Speck brought him to the Catawba reservation.[5] This had apparently been enough to fool the non-Native ethnologists who wrote about him.[5]
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