The Rumsen language (also known as Rumsien, Rumsun, ''San Carlos Costanoan'' and ''Carmeleno'') is one of eight Ohlone languages, historically spoken by the Rumsen people of

Northern California Northern California (commonly shortened to NorCal) is a geocultural region that comprises the northern portion of the U.S. state of California, spanning the northernmost 48 of the state's List of counties in California, 58 counties. Northern Ca ...

. The Rumsen language was spoken from the Pajaro River to Point Sur, and on the lower courses of the Pajaro, as well as on the Salinas and Carmel Rivers, and the region of the present-day cities of Salinas,

Monterey Monterey ( ; ) is a city situated on the southern edge of Monterey Bay, on the Central Coast of California. Located in Monterey County, the city occupies a land area of and recorded a population of 30,218 in the 2020 census. The city was fou ...

and Carmel.

History

One of eight languages within the

Ohlone The Ohlone ( ), formerly known as Costanoans (from Spanish meaning 'coast dweller'), are a Native Americans in the United States, Native American people of the Northern California coast. When Spanish explorers and missionaries arrived in the l ...

branch of the Utian family, it became one of two important native languages spoken at the Mission San Carlos Borroméo de Carmelo founded in 1770, the other being the Esselen language. The last fluent speaker of Rumsen was Isabel Meadows,Hinton 2001:430
/ref> who died in 1939. The

Bureau of American Ethnology The Bureau of American Ethnology (or BAE, originally, Bureau of Ethnology) was established in 1879 by an act of Congress for the purpose of transferring archives, records and materials relating to the Indians of North America from the Departme ...

linguist John Peabody Harrington conducted very extensive fieldwork with Meadows in the last several years of her life. These notes, still mostly unpublished, now constitute the foundation for current linguistic research and revitalization efforts on the Rumsen language. The Costanoan Rumsen Carmel Tribe has been in the process of reestablishing their language. They have begun efforts to teach their tribal members Rumsen and are working to complete a revised English - Rumsen Dictionary.

Rumsen-speaking tribes

Dialects of the Rumsen language were spoken by four independent local tribes, including the ''Rumsen'' themselves, the ''Ensen'' of the Salinas vicinity, the ''Calendaruc'' of the central shoreline of Monterey Bay, and the ''Sargentaruc'' of the

Big Sur Big Sur () is a rugged and mountainous section of the Central Coast (California), Central Coast of the U.S. state of California, between Carmel Highlands and San Simeon, where the Santa Lucia Range, Santa Lucia Mountains rise abruptly from th ...

Coast. The territory of the language group was bordered by Monterey Bay and the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five Borders of the oceans, oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean, or, depending on the definition, to Antarctica in the south, and is ...

to the west, the Awaswas Ohlone to the north, the Mutsun Ohlone to the east, the Chalon Ohlone on the south east, and the Esselen to the south.Milliken, Randall. 1987. ''Ethnohistory of the Rumsen''. Papers in Northern California Anthropology No. 2. Salinas, CA: Coyote Press.

Phonology

Notes

References

* Breschini, Gary S. and Trudy Haversat. 1994. Rumsen Seasonality and Population Dynamics. In ''The Ohlone Past and Present'', pp. 183–197, Lowell J. Bean, editor. Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press. * Hackel, Steven W. 2005. ''Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850''. University of North Carolina Press. * Hinton, Leanne. 2001. ''The Ohlone Languages'', in
The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice
', pp. 425–432. Emerald Group Publishing . * Kroeber, Alfred L. 1925. ''Handbook of the Indians of California''. Washington, D.C: ''Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin'' No. 78. (map of villages, page 465) * Levy, Richard. 1978. ''Costanoan'', in ''Handbook of North American Indians'', Vol. 8 (California). William C. Sturtevant, and Robert F. Heizer, eds. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978. / 0160045754, pages 485–495. * Milliken, Randall. 1987. ''Ethnohistory of the Rumsen''. Papers in Northern California Anthropology No. 2. Salinas, CA: Coyote Press. * Teixeira, Lauren. ''The Costanoan/Ohlone Indians of the San Francisco and Monterey Bay Area, A Research Guide''. Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press Publication, 1997. .

External links