[3] While the name Seneca, attested as early as the seventeenth century, is of obscure origins, the endonym Onödowáʼga꞉ translates to "those of the big hill.

[3] Seneca is first attested in two damaged dictionaries produced by the French Jesuit missionary Julien Garnier around the turn of the eighteenth century.

[6] Moreover, as these sound changes appear to be unique to Seneca, they have had the effect of making Seneca highly phonologically divergent from the languages most closely related to it, as well as making the underlying morphological richness of the language incredibly opaque.

[3][5] While the speech community has dwindled to approximately one hundred native speakers, revitalization efforts are underway.

[8] The School has published language learning tools and courses on the language-learning platform Memrise broken out by topic.

[10] As of summer 2012, The fewer than 50 native speakers of the Seneca Nation of Indians' language would agree that it is in danger of becoming extinct.

Fortunately, a $200,000 federal grant for the Seneca Language Revitalization Program has further solidified a partnership with Rochester Institute of Technology that will help develop a user-friendly computer catalogue allowing future generations to study and speak the language.

"[12] "Robbie Jimerson, a graduate student in RIT's computer science program and resident of the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation near Buffalo," who is working on the project, commented: "My grandfather has always said that a joke is funnier in Seneca than it is in English.

[15] Although former Seneca-owned radio station WGWE (whose call sign derives from "gwe," a Seneca word roughly translating to "what's up?")

In 2013, the first public sports event was held in the Seneca language, when middle school students served as announcers for a lacrosse match.

Prior to this, as part of the upgrade to Interstate 86, the names of townships within the Allegany Indian Reservation were marked in Seneca along the highway in Comic Sans.

[19] Note that orthographic representations of these sounds are given in angled brackets where different from the IPA transcription.

[21] /h/ is a voiceless segment [h] colored[clarification needed] by an immediately preceding and/or following vowel and/or resonant.

[20][22] Note that orthographic representations of these sounds are given in angled brackets where different from the IPA transcription.

[20] The following oral diphthongs occur in Seneca: ae, ai, ao, ea, ei, eo, oa, oe, and oi.

[clarification needed][24] Vowel length is marked with a colon ⟨꞉⟩, and open juncture by word space.

Additionally, word-initial and word-final syllables are underlyingly unaccented, although they can be given sentence level stress.

Moreover, [h] appears to be ambisyllabic intervocalically, and can be included in a cluster of multiple non-consonantal segments in the onset.

While most verb forms have multiple allomorphs, however, in the majority of cases, variants of morphemes cannot be reliably predicted on the basis of its phonological environment.

The verb base can be augmented by adding a derivational suffix, a middle voice or reflexive prefix, or an incorporated noun root.

Habitual and stative roots are related to the ending of the verb base, but have become largely arbitrary, or at least inconsistent.

These pronouns express number as singular, dual, or plural; moreover, in the case of pronominal prefixes describing agents, there is an inclusive/exclusive distinction in the first person.

Finally, certain prepronominal verbal prefixes can be suffixed to nouns to alter the meaning thereof; in particular, the cislocative, coincident, negative, partitive, and repetitive fall into this group.

[33] Particles, the only Seneca words that cannot be classified as nouns or verbs,[28] appear to follow the same ordering paradigm.

Moreover, given the agent/participant distinction that determines the forms of pronominal morphemes, it seems appropriate to consider Seneca a nominative-accusative language.

[36] Note: for clarity, certain graphemes employed by Mr. Holmer have been replaced with their modern, standard equivalents.

[37] Note: for clarity, certain graphemes employed by Mr. Holmer have been replaced with their modern, standard equivalents.

)years-oldkanöhkaʼitawiʼ.Kanöhka'itawi'cyäöwauwiʼWhen-they-told-himnuytiyenöweʼöhwhat-they-tried-to-dohënökweʼöwehthe-Indians......wae neʼkyöʼ nökweʼöweh ëötinötëʼtaʼ työtekëʼ skat tewënyaʼe {kei (corrected: wis)} niwashë keiskai nyushake nyuweʼ.

cyäöwauwiʼ nuytiyenöweʼöh hënökweʼöweh ...Therefore, so-it-is-said the-Indians they-will-burn-the-city Pittsburgh four hundred four tens and-one years ago.

Eight years-old Kanöhka'itawi' When-they-told-him what-they-tried-to-do the-Indians ...Therefore, it is said, the Indians intended to burn (the city of) Pittsburgh one-hundred-and-forty (fifty) -four years ago.