The Timucua Language: A Text-Based Reference Grammar

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.

George Aaron Broadwell is the Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida. He won the 2023 Victor Golla Prize from the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas and is the author of A Choctaw Reference Grammar (Nebraska, 2006).