Wintuan languages
Language family of Northern California, US
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wintuan (also Wintun, Wintoon, Copeh, Copehan) is an extinct family of languages spoken in the Sacramento Valley of central Northern California.
distributionCalifornia
| Wintun | |
|---|---|
| Copeh | |
| Geographic distribution | California |
| Ethnicity | Wintun people |
| Extinct | 2018, withe the death of Bertha Wright Mitchell (Patwin)[1][2][3] |
| Linguistic classification | Penutian ?
|
| Proto-language | Proto-Wintuan |
| Subdivisions |
|
| Language codes | |
| Glottolog | wint1258 |
Pre-contact distribution of Wintuan languages | |
Classification
Family division
William F. Shipley listed three Wintuan languages in his encyclopedic overview of California Indian languages.[4] More recently, Marianne Mithun split Southern Wintuan into a Patwin language and a Southern Patwin language, resulting in the following classification.[5]
- Wintuan
- Northern Wintuan
- Southern Wintuan
- † Patwin (a.k.a. Patween)
- † Southern Patwin
Wintu became extinct with the death of the last fluent speaker in 2003.[6] As of 2010[update], Nomlaki has at least one partial speaker.[6] Patwin became extinct in 2018.[1] Southern Patwin, once spoken by the Suisun local tribe just northeast of San Francisco Bay, became extinct in the early 20th century and is thus poorly known.[7][5] Wintu proper is the best documented of the four Wintuan languages.
Pitkin estimated that the Wintuan languages were about as close to each other as the Romance languages.[8] They may have diverged from a common tongue only 2,000 years ago. A comparative study including a reconstruction of Proto-Wintuan phonology, morphology and lexicon was undertaken by Shepherd.[9]
Possible relations to external language families
The Wintuan family is usually considered to be a member of the hypothetical Penutian language phylum[10] and was one of the five branches of the original California kernel of Penutian proposed by Roland B. Dixon and Alfred L. Kroeber.[11][12] However, recent studies suggest that the Wintuans independently entered California about 1,500 years ago from an earlier location somewhere in Oregon.[13] The Wintuan pronominal system closely resembles that of Klamath, while there are numerous lexical resemblances between Northern Wintuan and Alsea that appear to be loans.[14][15][16]
