Until the end of the seventeenth century, Massachusett was a locally important language. In its simplified pidgin form, it was adopted as a regional lingua franca of New England and Long Island. As a native language, its dialects were spoken by several peoples inhabiting the coastal and insular regions of Massachusetts and adjacent portions of northern and southeastern Rhode Island and portions of southeastern and coastal New Hampshire, with transitional dialects historically extending as far north as the southernmost tip of Maine. Due to the waves of epidemics that killed off most of the Native peoples, competition with the large influx of English colonists for land and resources and the great upheaval in the wake of King Philip's War, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the language and its speakers had contracted into a shrinking land base and population, concentrated in the former Praying towns of Natick and Ponkapoag and the larger Wampanoag, isolated Wampanoag settlements on the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket and Mashpee on the mainland. After another century of extreme assimilation pressure, intermarriage and the necessity of learning and using English in daily life, the language disappeared from Massachusett-speaking communities by the nineteenth century, with the very last speakers dying off at the century's end on Martha's Vineyard. Contemporary speakers are restricted to the area surrounding four communities on Cape Cod and the Islands and nearby regions just a little 'off Cape' including Mashpee, Aquinnah, Freetown, and Cedarville, Plymouth which are the home of the federally recognized Mashpee and Aquinnah and state recognized Assonet and Herring Pond tribes of Wampanoag that participate in the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project. Other tribes descended from Massachusett-speaking peoples with Commonwealth recognition include the Natick and the Ponkapoag tribes of Massachusett people and the Chappaquiddick, the Poccasset and the Seaconke tribes of Wampanoag people. Although these tribes do not have speakers nor participants of the WLRP, they continue to honor the documents of and translations for their ancestors as a historical, cultural, sacred and liturgical use, particularly in the old colonial script. Other groups with some ancestry from Massachusett-speaking peoples include the tribes that absorbed the refugees of King Philip's War such as the Abenaki () of northern New Hampshire, Vermont and Québec; the Schaghticoke () of western Connecticut along the border with New York and the Brothertown or Brotherton () and Stockbridge-Munsee (-), both amalgamations of peoples of southern New England and elsewhere that relocated to Wisconsin.