Beothuk language

Beothuk
Beothukan
Native to	Canada
Region	Newfoundland
Ethnicity	Beothuk people
Extinct	1829, with the death of Shanawdithit (Nancy April)
Language family	unclassified (Algonquian?)
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Linguist list	bue
Glottolog	beot1247
Pre-contact distribution of Beothuk language

The Beothuk language (/biːˈɒtək/ or /ˈbeɪ.əθʊk/), also called Beothukan, was spoken by the indigenous Beothuk people of Newfoundland. The Beothuk have been extinct since 1829 and there are few written accounts of their language, so little is known about it.

Beothuk is known only from four word lists written down in the 18th and 19th centuries. They contain more than 400 words but no examples of connected speech. However, a lack of any systematic or consistent representation of the vocabulary in the wordlists makes it daunting to establish what the sound system of Beothuk was, and words listed separately on the lists may be the same word transcribed in sundry ways. Moreover, the lists are known to have many mistakes. This, along with the lack of connected speech leaves little upon which to build any reconstruction of Beothuk. Claims of links with the neighbouring Algonquian language family date back at least to Robert 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, though if valid Beothuk would be an extremely divergent member of the family. Other researchers claimed that proposed similarities are more likely the result of borrowing rather than cognates. The limited and poor nature of the documentation means there is not enough evidence to draw strong conclusions. Owing of this overall lack of meaningful evidence, Ives Goddard and Lyle Campbell claim that any connections between Beothuk and Algonquian are unknown and likely unknowable.