The Catawba language has two documented dialects, Esaw and Saraw. Scholar Ives Goddard wrote the Saraw and Esaw dialects of Catawba presumably descend specifically from the Cheraw and the Esaw. Both dialects lasted into the 20th century.
Short vowel sounds /i,e,a,u/ can be heard as lax, ranging to [ɪ,ɛ~ə,ɑ,ʊ].
/u/ can range to [o], and a short /a/ can range to a central vowel [ə] or a back vowel sound [ɑ].
Orthography
A Catawba alphabet was created by the Catawba Language Project for the Catawba language, as part of a revitalization effort for the language and the creation of an app for it.[further explanation needed]
The aspirated ⟨ʰ⟩ is used in the word: hawuʰ 'thank you'.
The ⟨ʔ⟩ is written in different ways like ⟨ɂ⟩ and ⟨ˀ⟩ in some texts.
The ⟨o⟩ and ⟨ǫ⟩ is some time occurs in words like example, mǫ(hare) meaning 'ask', wǫ meaning 'call', mǫhee meaning 'ice', and sota meaning Santee Tribe.
Errata
Red Thunder Cloud, an impostor, born Cromwell Ashbie Hawkins West, claimed to be Catawba and the last speaker of the Catawba language. He was promoted by anthropologist Frank Speck, who introduced West to the Catawba community. The Catawba told Speck that West was not Catawba, but Speck ignored them and continued to promote West and include him in his work, even recommending him as an expert to other anthropologists. Speck at one time also insisted that the Cherokee language was Siouan. At his death in 1996 it was revealed that West was neither Catawba nor even Native American, but had learned what he knew of the language from books, and from listening to the last known native speaker, Samuel Taylor Blue and his half-sister, Sally Gordon, when Speck brought him to the Catawba reservation. This had apparently been enough to fool the non-Native ethnologists who wrote about him.
12Goddard, Ives (2005). "The Indigenous Languages of the Southeast". Anthropological Linguistics. 47 (1). Bloomington, IN: The Trustees of Indiana University on behalf of Anthropological Linguistics: 9. ISSN1944-6527. Retrieved 29 July 2026. The Esaw and Saraw dialects presumably trace back to two aggregations of small tribes that coalesced after the Tuscarora War of 1711-13, the Catawba-Esaw on the Catawba River and the Cheraw-Saraw on the Pee Dee River. The modern Catawba people descend from these two ethnically and linguistically diverse components...
↑Goddard, Ives (2000). "The Identity of Red Thunder Cloud"(PDF). The Newsletter -- Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. 19 (1): 7–10. Archived from the original(PDF) on 4 October 2023. Retrieved 5 April 2021.
Heath, Charles L. (2004). Davis, R. P. Stephen Jr. (ed.). "Catawba Militarism: Ethnohistorial and Archaeological Overviews"(PDF). North Carolina Archaeology. 53. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina and The North Carolina Archaeological Society Inc.: 80–120.
External links
Ives Goddard, 2000. "The Identity of Red Thunder Cloud", Smithsonian Institution, reprinted from Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas Newsletter. (accessed 2021-05-25)
