A Lexicon of Modern Mohegan: The Dialect of Jits Bodunaxa

Mohegan, a dialect of the Mohegan-Pequot language of Southern New England, was one of the major Algonquian languages of Connecticut, spoken from the Connecticut River in the west to the Thames River in the east and from central Connecticut south to Long Island Sound from at least the 13th century through the 1800s. Its last speaker, Mrs. Fidelia A.H. Fielding, died in 1908. From detailed professional phonetic recordings of lengthy texts from Mrs. Fielding's speech it is possible to recover a significant vocabulary in Modern Mohegan as it was spoken in the early years of the last century. The application of known phonological correspondences between the Mohegan dialect and the mutually intelligible neighboring Pequot dialect make it possible to reconstruct a large number of probably occurring lexical items which may be added to the total vocabulary of Modern Mohegan. This vocabulary, in both Mohegan-English and English-Mohegan alphabetical listings, is presented in the Lexicon along with a detailed description of the methods by which the data were recovered, phonemicized, and normalized.