Cruzeño, also known as Isleño (Ysleño) or Island Chumash, was one of the

Chumashan languages Chumashan was a family of languages that were spoken on the southern California coast by Native American Chumash people, from the Coastal plains and valleys of San Luis Obispo to Malibu, neighboring inland and Transverse Ranges valleys and ca ...

spoken along the coastal areas of

Southern California Southern California (commonly shortened to SoCal) is a geographic and Cultural area, cultural region that generally comprises the southern portion of the U.S. state of California. It includes the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the second most po ...

. It shows evidence of mixing between a core Chumashan language such as Barbareño or Ventureño and an indigenous language of the

Channel Islands The Channel Islands ( nrf, Îles d'la Manche; french: îles Anglo-Normandes or ''îles de la Manche'') are an archipelago in the English Channel, off the French coast of Normandy. They include two Crown Dependencies: the Bailiwick of Jersey, ...

. The latter was presumably spoken on the islands since the end of the last ice age separated them from the mainland; Chumash would have been introduced in the first millennium after the introduction of plank canoes on the mainland. Evidence of the substratum language is retained in a noticeably non-Chumash phonology, and basic non-Chumash words such as those for 'water' and 'house'.Golla, Victor. (2011). ''California Indian Languages''. Berkeley: University of California Press.

References

* Heizer R. F., ed. 1952
California Indian linguistic records: The Mission Indian vocabularies of Alphonse Pinart
University of California Anthropological Records 15:1-84. * Heizer R. F., ed. 1952
California Indian linguistic records: The Mission Indian vocabularies of H.W. Henshaw
University of California Anthropological Records 15:85-202.

External links

Island Chumash language
— overview at the

Survey of California and Other Indian Languages The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (originally the Survey of California Indian Languages) at the University of California at Berkeley documents, catalogs, and archives the indigenous languages of the Americas. The survey also hosts ...

Berkeley.edu; California Language Archive: Island Chumash languageOLAC resources about the Cruzeño language
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cruzeno language Chumashan languages Channel Islands of California Indigenous languages of California Extinct languages of North America Languages extinct in the 20th century History of Santa Barbara County, California History of Ventura County, California