The Tataviam language was spoken by the

Tataviam people The Tataviam (Kitanemuk: ''people on the south slope'') are a Native American group in Southern California. The ancestral land of the Tataviam people includes northwest present-day Los Angeles County and southern Ventura County, primarily in th ...

of the upper Santa Clara River basin,

Santa Susana Mountains The Santa Susana Mountains are a transverse range of mountains in Southern California, north of the city of Los Angeles, in the United States. The range runs east-west, separating the San Fernando and Simi valleys on its south from the Santa Cla ...

, and

Sierra Pelona Mountains The Sierra Pelona, also known as the Sierra Pelona Ridge or the Sierra Pelona Mountains, is a mountain ridge in the Transverse Ranges in Southern California. Located in northwest Los Angeles County, the ridge is bordered on the north by the San An ...

in southern

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 had become extinct by 1916 and is known only from a few early records, notably a few words recorded by

Alfred L. Kroeber Alfred Louis Kroeber (June 11, 1876 – October 5, 1960) was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the first ...

and

John P. Harrington John Peabody Harrington (April 29, 1884 – October 21, 1961) was an American linguist and ethnologist and a specialist in the indigenous peoples of California. Harrington is noted for the massive volume of his documentary output, most of which h ...

in the early decades of the 20th century. These word lists were not from native speakers, but from the children of the last speakers who remembered a few words and phrases.

Language family

Uto-Aztecan

Scholars have recognized Tataviam as belonging to the

Uto-Aztecan Uto-Aztecan, Uto-Aztekan or (rarely in English) Uto-Nahuatl is a family of indigenous languages of the Americas, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The na ...

language family, specifically the

Takic The Takic languages are a putative group of Uto-Aztecan languages historically spoken by a number of Indigenous peoples of California, Indigenous peoples of Southern California. Takic is grouped with the Tübatulabal language, Tubatulabal, Hopi la ...

branch. Based on the most thorough and most recent analysis, it is part of the Serran group along with

Kitanemuk The Kitanemuk are an indigenous people of California. They traditionally lived in the Tehachapi Mountains and the Antelope Valley area of the western Mojave Desert of southern California, United States. Today some Kitanemuk people are enrolled in ...

and Serrano (Munro and Johnson, 2001).

Chumashan

An earlier alternative suggestion by some scholars is that Tataviam was a Chumashan language, from a

Ventureño language Ventureño is a member of the extinct Chumashan languages, a group of Native American languages previously spoken by the Chumash people along the coastal areas of Southern California from as far north as San Luis Obispo to as far south as Malibu ...

and others, of the

Chumash Chumash may refer to: *Chumash (Judaism), a Hebrew word for the Pentateuch, used in Judaism *Chumash people, a Native American people of southern California *Chumashan languages, indigenous languages of California See also * Chumash traditional ...

-Ventureño and other Chumash groups, that had been influenced by the neighboring Uto-Aztecan speaking peoples (Beeler and Klar 1977). However, the Beeler and Klar proposal is based on a word-list collected by C. Hart Merriam while the Takic proposals are based on different word lists collected by Alfred Kroeber and John P. Harrington. The current opinion is that the Merriam word lists represent a dialect of Ventureño (called Alliklik or Castac Chumash) and the Kroeber and Harrington word list represents a divergent Takic language (called Tataviam).

External links

Fernandeno Tataviam Band of Mission Indians, tribal government websiteTataviam language
overview at the

References

* Beeler, Madison, and Kathryn A. Klar. 1977. "Interior Chumash". ''Journal of California Anthropology'' 4:287-305. * Bright, William. 1975. "The Alliklik Mystery". ''Journal of California Anthropology'', 2:228-230. * Goddard, Ives. 1996. "Introduction". In ''Languages'', edited by Ives Goddard, pp. 1–16. Handbook of North American Indians, William C. Sturtevant, general editor, vol. 17. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. * Hinton, Leanne. 1994. ''Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages''. Heyday Books, Berkeley, California. * Hudson, Travis. 1982. "The Alliklik-Tataviam Problem". ''Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology'' 4:222-232. * Johnson, John R., and David D. Earle. 1990. "Tataviam Geography and Ethnohistory". ''Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology'' 12:191-214. * Pamela Munro with John Johnson. 2001. "What Do We Know about Tataviam? Comparisons with Kitanemuk, Gabrielino, Kawaiisu, and Tübatulabal," paper presented to the Friends of Uto-Aztecan Conference, Santa Barbara, California, July 9, 2001. * King, Chester, and Thomas C. Blackburn. 1978. "Tataviam". In ''California'', edited by Robert F. Heizer, pp. 535–537.

Handbook of North American Indians The ''Handbook of North American Indians'' is a series of edited scholarly and reference volumes in Native American studies, published by the Smithsonian Institution beginning in 1978. Planning for the handbook series began in the late 1960s and ...

William C. Sturtevant William Curtis Sturtevant (1926 Morristown, New Jersey – March 2, 2007) was an anthropologist and ethnologist. He is best known as the general editor of the 20-volume ''Handbook of North American Indians''. Renowned anthropologist Claude Lévi-S ...

, general editor, vol. 8. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. {{DEFAULTSORT:Tataviam Language Takic languages Extinct languages of North America