A dozen words for which translations were recorded and 50 or 60 place names form the entire known corpus of the language.
Circumstantial evidence, primarily from Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, suggests that all of the peoples of southern Florida and the Tampa Bay area, including the Tequesta, Mayaimi, and Tocobaga, as well as the Calusa, spoke dialects of a common language.
[3] Julian Granberry (1994) has suggested that the Calusa language was related to the Tunica language of the lower Mississippi River Valley, with Calusa possibly being relatively a recent arrival from the lower Mississippi region.
A few vocabulary examples from Granberry (2011) are listed below:[4] (*) denotes earlier century Calusa language records.
Some Calusa words, proper nouns, and phrases from Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda's writings (including his 1575 memoir Memoria de las cosas y costa y indios de la Florida) that are cited in Zamponi (2024) include:[2] Sipi is the name of a main idol in a Calusa temple, according to a 1743 report (Informe) by Fr.