Native Languages of the Americas:
Beothuk (Beothuck, Skraeling, Red Indian)
Language: Little is known of the Beothuk language today. Our only records are a few
Beothuk words collected from children and young women the British captured as slaves, usually at the cost of their
families' lives. The vocabulary sets provided by these traumatized youths are small and don't match each other well (it
didn't help that the Beothuks were asked to name housecats, glass, tea, and other European objects they had never seen before.)
Nothing was recorded about the structure of the Beothuk language at all. Some linguists believe it was an
Algonquian language, possibly related to
Innu. Others consider it a language isolate, unrelated to any other
known language.
People: The Beothucks were probably the Skraelings described by
Viking explorers, and therefore the first
American Indians ever to encounter Europeans. It's possible the Skraelings were
Mi'kmaq
or Innu instead; however,
ruins of the Viking settlement were unearthed in
L'Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland, which
was territory known to have belonged to the Beothuck people. Also, the Norse description of natives obsessed with the
color red matches the Beothucks, who decorated themselves so extensively with red ochre that the British called them the Red Indians
(a term that has found an unfortunate second life as a racist epithet.) Anything Beothuck oral history may have said about
this encounter has been lost to time. The Beothucks and the second wave of European colonists never even learned to communicate
with each other before the Beothuck people were wiped out completely, so they will always remain something of an enigma.
Almost everything we know about their culture comes from the stories and drawings of two Beothuk women, Demasduit and
Shanawdithit, who were captured by the British in the 19th century and learned a bit of English before dying of tuberculosis.
History: Many American Indian cultures are wrongly declared "extinct" when in fact they have only been relocated or
forced into a different lifestyle. The Beothuks, though, really are extinct. The only natives of the eastern seaboard to ally with
neither the French nor the English (or, for that matter, the Iroquois
or Wabanakis), the Beothuk tribe paid a heavy price
for their isolation. That the French paid the Mi'kmaq to
annihilate the Beothuks is denied by both, but the French and Mi'kmaq certainly drove them inland from the Newfoundland coast
they relied on for food, and starvation is blamed for many Beothuk deaths. The English shot them on sight, and the
Mohawks raided Beothuk villages for slaves. By 1800 the Beothuks
only made the history books as the occasional captive servant of an Englishman, and in 1829 the last known Beothuk, a woman named
Shawnadithit or Shanawdithit, died in English captivity. A few Beothuk descendants surfaced among the Mi'kmaq and Mohawk after that (those
tribes often adopted captured enemies), and other Beothuks may have fled to the
Innus for protection. By 1900, though, the assimilation of any
refugees into those neighboring tribes was complete. There are no known descendants of the Beothuk Indians today.
Native American cultures
Beothuk Language Resources
Beothuk Language Resources
Beothuk Vocabulary:
The Beothuk Indians, Article Two 
