Klamath (), also Klamath–Modoc () and historically Lutuamian (), is a
Native American language
Native may refer to:
People
* Jus soli, citizenship by right of birth
* Indigenous peoples, peoples with a set of specific rights based on their historical ties to a particular territory
** Native Americans (disambiguation)
In arts and enterta ...
spoken around
Klamath Lake
Upper Klamath Lake (sometimes called Klamath Lake) ( Klamath: ?ews, "lake" ) is a large, shallow freshwater lake east of the Cascade Range in south-central Oregon in the United States. The largest body of fresh water by surface area in Oregon, it ...
in what is now southern
Oregon
Oregon () is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of it ...
and northern
California
California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...
. It is the traditional language of the
Klamath Klamath may refer to:
Ethnic groups
*Klamath people, a Native American people of California and Oregon
**Klamath Tribes, a federally recognized group of tribes in Oregon
*Klamath language, spoken by the Klamath people
Places in the United States
* ...
and
Modoc
Modoc may refer to:
Ethnic groups
*Modoc people, a Native American/First Nations people
** Modoc language
**Modoc Tribe of Oklahoma, a federally recognized tribe of Modoc
*Modoc War, the last armed resistance of the Modoc people in 1873
*The "Mo ...
peoples, each of whom spoke a dialect of the language. By 1998, only one native speaker remained, and by 2003, this last fluent Klamath speaker who was living in
Chiloquin, Oregon
Chiloquin ( ) (Klamath: mbosaksawaas, "flint place" ) is a city in Klamath County, Oregon, United States. Chiloquin was the pioneer version of a Klamath family name ''Chaloquin'', which was the name of a Klamath chief who was alive at the time o ...
, was 92 years old. As of 2006 there were no fluent native speakers of either the Klamath or Modoc dialects;
[ Golla, Victor. (2011)]
California Indian Languages
Berkeley/Los Angeles, California : University of California Press. however, as of 2019, revitalization efforts are underway with the goal of creating new speakers.
Klamath is a member of the
Plateau Penutian
Plateau Penutian (also Shahapwailutan, Lepitan) is a family of languages spoken in northern California, reaching through central-western Oregon to northern Washington and central-northern Idaho.
Family division
Plateau Penutian consists of four ...
language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in hist ...
, which is in turn a branch of the proposed
Penutian
Penutian is a proposed grouping of language families that includes many Native American languages of western North America, predominantly spoken at one time in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California. The existence of a Penutian s ...
language family. Like other proposed Penutian languages, Plateau Penutian languages are rich in
ablaut
In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German ''Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE).
An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...
, much like
Indo-European
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch ...
and
Afro-Asiatic
The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic su ...
languages. Further evidence for this classification includes some consonant correspondences between Klamath and other alleged Penutian languages. For example, the Proto-
Yokuts
The Yokuts (previously known as MariposasPowell, 1891:90–91.) are an ethnic group of Native Americans native to central California. Before European contact, the Yokuts consisted of up to 60 tribes speaking several related languages. ''Yokuts ...
retroflexes correspond to Klamath , and the Proto-Yokuts
dentals correspond to the Klamath
alveolars .
Phonology
Vowels
Consonants
Obstruent
An obstruent () is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well as ...
s in Klamath, except for , and , all come in triplets of
unaspirated
In linguistics, a tenuis consonant ( or ) is an obstruent that is voiceless, unaspirated and unglottalized.
In other words, it has the "plain" phonation of with a voice onset time close to zero (a zero-VOT consonant), as Spanish ''p, t, ch ...
, aspirated, and
ejective
In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some l ...
sounds.
Sonorant
In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are ...
triplets are
voiced
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced.
The term, however, is used to refer ...
, voiceless, and "laryngealized" sounds.
Most consonants can be
geminated
In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from ''gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from s ...
. The fricative is an exception, and there is evidence suggesting this is a consequence of a recent
sound change
A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chang ...
.
Albert Samuel Gatschet
Albert Samuel Gatschet (October 3, 1832, Beatenberg, Canton of Bern – March 16, 1907, Washington, D.C.) was a Swiss-American ethnologist who trained as a linguist in the universities of Bern and Berlin. He later moved to the United States and s ...
recorded geminated in the late 19th century, but this sound was consistently recorded as degeminated by
M. A. R. Barker
Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker (born Phillip Barker, November 3, 1929 – March 16, 2012) was an American linguist who was professor of Urdu and South Asian Studies and created one of the first roleplaying games, ''Empire of the Petal Throne' ...
in the 1960s. Sometime after Gatschet recorded the language and before Barker did the same, may have degeminated into .
Syntax
Klamath word order is conditioned by pragmatics. There is no clearly defined verb phrase or noun phrase. Alignment is nominative–accusative, with nominal case marking also distinguishing adjectives from nouns. Many verbs obligatorily classify an absolutive case. There are directive and
applicative constructions.
[ Rude, 1988.]
See also
*
List of extinct languages of North America
This is a list of extinct languages of North America, languages which have undergone language death, have no native speakers and no spoken descendant, most of them being languages of former Native American tribes.
There are 108 languages lis ...
Notes
References
*
Barker, M. A. R. (1963a). ''Klamath Texts''. University of California Publications in Linguistics, volume 30. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
*
———. (1963b).
Klamath Dictionary
'. University of California Publications in Linguistics 31. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
*
———. (1964). ''Klamath Grammar''. University of California Publications in Linguistics 32. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
*
Barker, Philip. (1959). The Klamath language. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley
*
Blevins, Juliette. (1993). Klamath Laryngeal Phonology. The University of Chicago Press
*
Blevins, J. (2004, July)
Klamath sibilant degemination: Implications of a recent sound change.
'' IJAL'', ''70'', 279–289.
*
Chen, D. W. (1998, April 5). Blackboard: Lost languages; Kuskokwim
The Kuskokwim River or Kusko River (Yup'ik: ''Kusquqvak''; Deg Xinag: ''Digenegh''; Upper Kuskokwim: ''Dichinanek' ''; russian: Кускоквим (''Kuskokvim'')) is a river, long, in Southwest Alaska in the United States. It is the ninth la ...
not spoken here. ''New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
''.
*
*
Maudlin, W. S. (1998, April 17)
Yale linguists part of effort to save dying languages
''The Yale Herald
''The Yale Herald'' is a newspaper run by undergraduate students at Yale University since 1986. A weekly, the paper aims to provide in-depth, investigative reporting, and includes personal essays, interviews, opinion pieces, culture articles, revi ...
''. Retrieved May 6, 2008
*
Rude, Noel (1987). Some Sahaptian-Klamath grammatical correspondences. ''Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics'', 12:67-83.
*
Rude, Noel (1988)
Semantic and pragmatic objects in Klamath.
In ''In Honor of Mary Haas: From the Haas Festival Conference on Native American Linguistics'', ed. by William Shipley, pp. 651–73. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
*
Rude, Noel (1991). Verbs to promotional suffixes in Sahaptian and Klamath. In ''Approaches to Grammaticalization'', ed. by Elizabeth C. Traugott and Bernd Heine. ''Typological Studies in Language'' 19:185-199. New York and Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Online texts
* Includes Klamath language plant names.
*
*
*
External links
The Klamath Tribes Language Project native-languages.org
Modoc languageoverview 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 ...
Klamath language California Language Archive
OLAC resources in and about the Klamath-Modoc language
{{DEFAULTSORT:Klamath language
Klamath
Modoc tribe
Plateau Penutian languages
Indigenous languages of the North American Plateau
Indigenous languages of California
Indigenous languages of Oregon
Extinct languages of North America
Languages extinct in the 2000s
Language isolates of North America
2003 disestablishments in the United States