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.