Reconstructing Stress in Wôpanâak

Wôpanâak (also called Wampanoag, Massachusett, Natick), the original language of much of eastern Massachusetts, is known to us from a variety of seventeenth, and eighteenth-century documents, which mostly do not indicate the position of word-level stress. We do have one poem in Wôpanâak, a translation of the book of Psalms into verse. In this paper I present a description of the rules for stress in Wôpanâak, based largely on an analysis of the metrical version of Psalms.