Plateau Penutian (also Shahapwailutan, Lepitan) is a family of languages spoken in 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 ...

, reaching through central-western

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 ...

to northern

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...

and central-northern

Idaho Idaho ( ) is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. To the north, it shares a small portion of the Canada–United States border with the province of British Columbia. It borders the states of Montana and Wyom ...

Family division

Plateau Penutian consists of four languages:

History

Plateau Penutian as originally proposed was one branch of the hypothetical

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 ...

phylum as proposed by

Edward Sapir Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American Jewish anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States. Sa ...

. The original proposal also included Cayuse (which was grouped with Molala into a Waiilatpuan branch); however, this language has little documentation and that which is documented is inadequately recorded. Thus, the status of Cayuse within Penutian (or any other genealogical relation for that matter) may very well forever remain

unclassified Classified information is material that a government body deems to be sensitive information that must be protected. Access is restricted by law or regulation to particular groups of people with the necessary security clearance and need to know, ...

. The Sahaptian grouping of Sahaptin and Nez Percé has long been uncontroversial. Several linguists have published mounting evidence in support of a connection between Klamath (a.k.a. Klamath-Modoc) and Sahaptian. Howard BermanBerman, H. (1996)
The Position of Molala in Plateau Penutian
''International Journal of American Linguistics, 62''(1), 1-30. provides rather convincing evidence to include Molala within Plateau Penutian. Recent appraisals of the Penutian hypothesis find Plateau Penutian to be "well supported" by specialists (DeLancey & Golla (1997: 181); Campbell 1997), with DeLancey & Golla (1997: 180) cautiously stating "while all subgroupings at this stage of Penutian research must be considered provisional, several linkages show considerable promise" (Campbell 1997 likewise mentions similar caveats). Other researchers have pointed out promising similarities between Plateau Penutian and the

Maiduan Maiduan (also Maidun, Pujunan) is a small endangered language, endangered language family of northeastern California. Family division The Maiduan consists of 4 languages: # Maidu language, Maidu ''†'' (also known as Maidu proper, Northeaste ...

family, although this proposal is still not completely demonstrated. A connection with Uto-Aztecan has also been suggested (Rude 2000). The coherence of Plateau Penutian is also supposed in an automated computational analysis (

ASJP The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists ...

4) by Müller et al. (2013). The analysis also found

Algic The Algic languages (also Algonquian–Wiyot–Yurok or Algonquian–Ritwan) are an indigenous language family of North America. Most Algic languages belong to the Algonquian subfamily, dispersed over a broad area from the Rocky Mountains to ...

lexical influence on the Plateau Penutian languages.Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013.
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'.

References

Bibliography

*Campbell, Lyle. (1997). ''American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America''. New York: Oxford University Press. . *Campbell, Lyle; & Mithun, Marianne (Eds.). (1979). ''The languages of native America: Historical and comparative assessment''. Austin: University of Texas Press. *DeLancey, Scott; & Golla, Victor. (1997). The Penutian hypothesis: Retrospect and prospect. ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', ''63'', 171-202. *Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996). ''Languages''. Handbook of North American Indians (W. C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. . *Goddard, Ives. (1999). ''Native languages and language families of North America'' (rev. and enlarged ed. with additions and corrections). ap Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press (Smithsonian Institution). (Updated version of the map in Goddard 1996). . *Mithun, Marianne. (1999). ''The languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); . *Rude, Noel. (1987)
"Some Sahaptian-Klamath grammatical correspondences."
''Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics'', 12:67-83. *Rude, Noel. (2000). Some Uto-Aztecan-Plateau Grammatical Comparisons. In ''Uto-Aztecan: Structural, Temporal, and Geographic Perspectives: Papers in Memory of Wick R. Miller by the Friends of Uto-Aztecan'', edited by Eugene H. Casad and Thomas L. Willet, pp. 309–318. Hermosillo, Sonora, México: Editorial UniSon. *Sapir, Edward. (1929). Central and North American languages. In ''The encyclopædia britannica: A new survey of universal knowledge'' (14 ed.) (Vol. 5, pp. 138–141). London: The Encyclopædia Britannica Company, Ltd. {{Language families * Indigenous languages of California Indigenous languages of the North American Plateau Indigenous languages of North America Proposed language families