Tuscarora, sometimes called Skarò˙rə̨ˀ, is the Iroquoian language of the Tuscarora people, spoken in southern Ontario, Canada, North Carolina and northwestern New York around Niagara Falls, in the United States before becoming extinct in late 2020.

The historic homeland of the Tuscarora was in eastern North Carolina, in and around the Goldsboro, Kinston, and Smithfield areas.

The language can appear complex to those unfamiliar with it more in terms of its grammar than its sound system.

The language is written using mostly symbols from the Roman alphabet, with some variations, additions, and diacritics.

This branch of Iroquois includes Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Cayuga along with Tuscarora and its historic neighbor, Nottoway.

[4] However, Lounsbury (1961:17) classed Tuscarora, along with Laurentian, Huron-Wyandot, and Cherokee as the "peripheral" Iroquoian languages—in distinction to the five "inner languages" of the Iroquois proper.

[7] The Tuscarora language has ten symbols representing consonants, including three stops (/k/, /t/, and /ʔ/), three fricatives (/s/, /θ/, and /h/), a nasal (/n/), a rhotic (/ɾ/), and two glides (/w/ and /j/).

[kʷ] could be considered separate, although it is very similar to /k/+/w/, and can be counted as a variant phonetic realization of these two sounds.

A voiceless /n/ is described as "a silent movement of the tongue accompanied by an audible escape of breath through the nose.

Prepronominal prefixes can indicate In addition, these can mark such distinctions as dualic, contrastive, partitive, and iterative.

According to Marianne Mithun Williams, it is possible to find some semantic similarities from the functions of prepronominal prefixes, but not such that each morpheme is completely explained in this way.

As it sounds, pronominal prefixes identify pronouns with regards to the verb, including person, number, and gender.

Possibilities include reflexive, inchoative, reversive, intensifier, and distributive morphemes, instrumental, causative, or dative case markers, and also incorporated noun stems.

Genders include: The prefixes are: Most stems are simple noun roots that are morphologically unanalyzable.

In addition to the formal nouns mentioned above, clauses, verbs, and unanalyzable particles can also be classified as nominals.

Attributive suffixes come in many forms: A diminutive indicates something smaller; an augmentive makes something bigger.

The basic word order in Tuscarora is SVO (subject–verb–object), but this can vary somewhat and still form grammatical sentences, depending on who the agents and patients are.

Such is the case, for example, in a noun-predicate-noun sentence in which both nouns are third person zoic (non-human) singular.

If one is of a "superior" status, it can be indicated by a pronominal prefix, such as hra, and as such SVO, VSO, and OSV are all grammatically correct.

Mithun writes: "[I]t is necessary but not sufficient to consider the syntactic case roles of major constituents.

A sentence that is ambiguous on basis of its containing too many ambiguous arguments is: tsya:tsGeorgewahrá:nę:the-fed-itkę:tsyęhfishtsya:ts wahrá:nę:t kę:tsyęhGeorge he-fed-it fishThis could be translated either as "George fed the fish" or "George fed it fish.

In Tuscarora, one long verb can be an entire sentence, including subject and object.

Examples are as follows:[10] nDUC++ęFUT++k1++hOBJ++eyHUM++aʔREFL++tsiʔr'fire'++aʔn'set'+ ihr n + ę + k + h + ey + aʔ + tsiʔr + aʔn + ihrDUC + FUT + 1 + OBJ + HUM + REFL + 'fire' + 'set'"I'll set my fire on him."

tswé:ʔn [tʃwæʔṇ] 'hello' stá:kwi:ʔ [stɒ´ːkwiːʔ] 'high' kè:rih [kjæ´ːrih] 'I think' ótkwareh 'blood' otá:ʔnareh 'bread'