Onʌyota’a:ka – Onʌyotaʔa·ka

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The Oneidas, originally from north central New York State around Lake Oneida, today live in Wisconsin (near Green Bay) and Southern Ontario (near London) as well.

Their writing system is very much based on the Iroquoianist tradition. There are a few special symbols, the most obvious being the upside-down “v”, which is a common phonetic symbol.

Note: There are several Roman Orthography conventions on this site that may require further explanation. On the charts below, there is lots of phonetic terminology that may not be familiar to everyone.

Consonants

	bilabial	alveolar	palatal	velar	glottal
lenis stop		t		k	’/ʔ
voiceless fricative		s			h
nasal		n
approximate	w	l	y

Vowels

	front oral	central nasal	back oral	back nasal
high	i			u
mid	e	ʌ	o
low			a

The United States Census counts 314 Oneida speakers, while the Canadian Census groups them together with other Iroquoian languages. Howe and Cook report 200 speakers in Canada, and fewer than 15 in the U.S. Compare these figures to those on the main Iroquoian page on this site, which were collected from within the communities themselves.

Community Names:

Forthcoming

Notes

Stress is marked with an acute accent: ‹á›. Vowel length is written with a colon ‹:› in Canada and with a raised dot ‹·› in the US.
Underlined letters are pronounced voiceless (whispered).
Stops are voiced before vowels. Some writers use ‹d›, ‹g›, and ‹j› instead of ‹t›, ‹k›, and ‹ts› before vowels.
Some consider /ts/ and /kw/ to be single phonemes.
There is some variation between the apostrophe ‹’› and the symbol ‹ʔ› for the glottal stop sound, with the apostrophe being more common in Canada. For some, there is a strong preference for a glottal stop which looks like a dotless question mark: without an extended stem. This should be treated as a glyph/font variant of the standard glottal stop.

Last Update: August 21, 2008