Description:
Finalist for the 2026 Leonard Bloomfield Book Award
The Timucua Language is a comprehensive reference grammar of Timucua, the Native language of much of northern Florida during the Spanish colonial period. Though the Timucua language is no longer spoken, written Timucua was extensively used as a medium of Franciscan evangelism in the seventeenth century; indeed, the Timucua catechisms from 1612 are the earliest written records in any Native language of the land that is now the United States. Two secular letters in the language also survive from that period. As a whole, the Timucua written corpus gives us incomparable insight into the Indigenous culture and history of early Florida.
This grammar is based on a thorough study of the extant printed and handwritten documents and on careful philological and comparative analysis of the corpus. Because the content of printed Timucua material often varies considerably from the Spanish text printed in parallel with it, careful study of Timucua grammar enables linguists, anthropologists, and historians to begin to read these critical texts in Florida and southeastern U.S. history.
Review Quotes: "Very important to the early history of Florida, this analysis of Timucua will make it possible for others to work on the language and unlock previously inaccessible materials. . . . A remarkable achievement. George Aaron Broadwell has made a thorough search of archival Spanish materials, gathered transcriptions and translations into a database, and--in a process that can be likened to decipherment--has worked out plausible interpretations of the meanings of words and affixes."--Jack B. Martin, author of A Grammar of Creek (Muskogee)