| Calusa | |
| Region: | Florida |
| Extinct: | ca. 1800 |
| Family: | unclassified (related to Tunica?) |
| Familycolor: | American |
| Iso3: | none |
| Glotto: | calu1239 |
| Glottorefname: | Calusa |
| States: | United States |
| Ethnicity: | Calusa |
The Calusa language is an unclassified language of southern Florida, United States that was spoken by the Calusa people.
Little is known of the language of the Calusa. A dozen words for which translations were recorded and 50 or 60 place names form the entire known corpus of the language. Circumstantial evidence, primarily from Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, suggests that all of the peoples of southern Florida and the Tampa Bay area, including the Tequesta, Mayaimi, and Tocobaga, as well as the Calusa, spoke dialects of a common language. This language was distinct from the languages of the Apalachee, Timucua, Mayaca, and Ais people in central and northern Florida.[1]
Julian Granberry (1994) has suggested that the Calusa language was related to the Tunica language of the lower Mississippi River Valley, with Calusa possibly being relatively a recent arrival from the lower Mississippi region. Another possibility was that similarities between the languages were derived from long-term mutual contact.
Granberry (2011) provides the following inventory of Calusa phonemes.[2]
| Plosive | p | t | tʃ | k | ʔ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fricative | s | h | ||||
| Rhotic | r | |||||
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | |||
| Lateral | l | |||||
| Approximant | w | j |
| Close | i | u | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Close-mid | e | o | ||
| Open-mid | ɛ | ɔ | ||
| Open | a |
A few vocabulary examples from Granberry (2011) are listed below:[3]
(*) denotes earlier century Calusa language records.
Some Calusa words, proper nouns, and phrases from Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda's writings (including his 1575 memoir Memoria de las cosas y costa y indios de la Florida) that are cited in Zamponi (2024) include:[4]
| Calusa | English gloss (Zamponi 2024) | Spanish gloss (original) | notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| carlos | ferocious people | quiere desir en su lenguaje pueblo feros | Spanish corruption of caalus | |
| Certepe | chief king and great lord | Rey mayor y gran señor | ||
| ño | beloved town | quiere dezir pueblo querido | ||
| seletega | Run, see if people are coming! | Corre mira si biene jente | ||
| tejiEue | lookout, vantage point | miradero quiere dezir | ||
| cañogacola | wicked people without respect | gente bellaca sin Respeto | from regions above Tampa on the Gulf Coast | |
| cuchiaga | place where there has been torture | quiere dezir lugar Amartirisado | from the Keys | |
| guarugunbe | town of weeping | quiere desir en rromanse pueblo de llanto | from the Keys | |
| guasaca Esgui | river of reeds | quiere desir Rio de cañas | from regions above Tampa on the Gulf Coast | |
| mayaimi | (very) large | llamase laguna de mayaimi porqués muy grande | from the Lake Okeechobee region | |
| tocobaga chile | el Rei casique mayor (...) llamase tocobaga chile | from the area around Tampa Bay |
Sipi is the name of a main idol in a Calusa temple, according to a 1743 report (Informe) by Fr. Joseph Xavier de Alaña that was sent to his superiors.[5]
See main article: Calusa–Tunica languages.