Loup is an extinct Algonquian language, or possibly group of languages, spoken in colonial New England. Loup ("Wolf") was a French colonial ethnographic term, and usage was inconsistent. In modern literature, it refers to two varieties, Loup A and Loup B.[1]
| Loup | |
|---|---|
| Pronunciation | [lu] |
| Native to | United States |
| Region | Massachusetts, Connecticut |
| Ethnicity | Nipmuck? |
| Extinct | 18th century |
Language family | Algic
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | Either:xlo – Loup Axlb – Loup B |
Linguist List | xlo Loup A |
xlb Loup B | |
| Glottolog | loup1243 Loup A |
Loup A, which may be the language of the Nipmuck, is principally attested from a word list recorded from refugees by the St. Francis mission to the Abenaki in Quebec. The descendants of these refugees became speakers of Western Abenaki in the eighteenth century. Loup B refers to a second word list, which shows extensive dialectal variation. This may not be a distinct language, but just notes on the speech of various New England Algonquian refugees in French missions.[2]

The phonology of Loup A (Nipmuck), reconstructed by Gustafson 2000:
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal/ Postalveolar |
Velar | Glottal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | pal. | plain | lab. | ||||
| Nasal | m | n | |||||
| Plosive | p | t | tʲ | k | (kʷ) | ||
| Affricate | tʃ | ||||||
| Fricative | s | h | |||||
| Lateral | l | ||||||
| Approximant | w | j | |||||
| Front | Back | |
|---|---|---|
| Close | i, iː | u |
| Mid | e | o, oː |
| Open | a, aː, ã | |
The vowel sounds likely have the same phonetic quality as other southern New England Algonquian languages. The short vowels /i o e a/ may represent the sounds as [ɪ], [ʊ], [ɛ,ə], and [ʌ], while the long vowels /iː/, /oː/, and /ã/ correspond to /i/, /o/, and /ã/.[3][4]
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Italics indicate extinct languages | |||||||||||||||