Massachusett writing systems describes the historic and modern systems used for writing Massachusett, an indigenous Algonquian language of the Algic language family. At the time Europeans colonized the region, Massachusett was the primary language of several peoples of New England, including the Massachusett in the area roughly corresponding to Boston, Massachusetts, including much of the Metrowest and South Shore areas just to the west and south of the city; the Wampanoag, who still inhabit Cape Cod and the Islands, most of Plymouth and Bristol counties and south-eastern Rhode Island, including some of the small islands in Narragansett Bay; the Nauset, who may have rather been an isolated Wampanoag sub-group, inhabited the extreme ends of Cape Cod; the Coweset of northern Rhode Island; and the Pawtucket which covered most of northeastern Massachusetts and the lower tributaries of the Merrimack River and coast of New Hampshire, and the extreme southernmost point of Maine. Massachusett was also used as a common second language of peoples throughout New England and Long Island, particularly in a simplified pidgin form. The missionary John Eliot learned the language from bilingual translators and interpreters. In writing down the language, he used the Latin alphabet and English-style orthographical conventions. By the 1650s, Eliot had begun translating portions of the Bible, some published, that were distributed to the Indians, and the Indians that learned to read became active agents in the spread of literacy. Eliot used the dialect of the Massachusett, specifically the speech of Natick, in his Bible translation—the first Bible in any language printed in the Americas—and other printed works; dialect leveling ensued. Several other missionaries fluent in the language also offered their own missionary tracts and translations. By the 1670s, only twenty years after Eliot's first translations, one in three Indians were literate. The language faded as Indians faced increasing dispossession and assimilation pressures, with the last speakers dying off at the tail end of the nineteenth century. In 1993, Jessie Little Doe Baird (née Fermino), co-founded the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project in an effort to bring the language back to her people. She studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with linguists Kenneth Hale and later Norvin Richards. In her master's thesis, completed in 2000, Baird introduced a modernized orthography based on the colonial system but with a one-to-one correlation between sound and spelling. In 2021, voters in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, approved installing bilingual English–Massachusetts street signs on First through Eighth Street (Nekône to Neeshwôsuktashe Taꝏmâôk, in Massachusetts) in East Cambridge. Installation of the signs will begin in 2024.
Pre-writing
Prior to the introduction of literacy by the missionary Eliot, the Massachusett-speaking peoples were mainly an orally transmitted culture, with social taboos, mores, customs, legends, history, knowledge and traditions passed from the elders to the next generation through song, stories and discussion. With peoples from further away, speakers switched to a pidgin variety of Massachusett used across New England, but when spoken language failed, sign language was used. Little is known about the Eastern Woodlands Algonquian sign language other than its usage. Lenape were often recruited in the wars with the Indians of the west because of their ability to effectively communicate in silence. Even American Sign Language was likely influenced by the sign language of the Wampanoag of Martha's Vineyard, who interacted with a large population of English colonists who were deaf and signed. Martha's Vineyard Sign Language went extinct at the beginning of the twentieth century, but many of its users were influential in the development of ASL. Little is known of it other than its existence, but it was likely similar in scope and usage such as extant Plains Indian Sign Language.
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