Upper Umpqua is an extinct

Athabaskan language Athabaskan (also spelled ''Athabascan'', ''Athapaskan'' or ''Athapascan'', and also known as Dene) is a large family of indigenous languages of the Americas, indigenous languages of North America, located in western North America in three areal ...

formerly spoken along the south fork of the

Umpqua River The Umpqua River ( ) on the Pacific coast of Oregon in the United States is approximately long. One of the principal rivers of the Oregon Coast and known for bass and shad, the river drains an expansive network of valleys in the mountains west ...

in west-central

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 ...

by Upper Umpqua (Etnemitane) people in the vicinity of modern Roseburg. It has been extinct for at least fifty years and little is known about it other than it belongs to the same ''Oregon Athabaskan'' cluster of

Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages Pacific Coast Athabaskan is a geographical and possibly genealogical grouping of the Athabaskan language family. California Athabaskan : 1. Hupa (dining'-xine:wh, a.k.a. Hoopa-Chilula) :: dialects: ::* Hupa ::* Tsnungwe ::: - tse:ning-xwe ::: - ...

as the

Lower Rogue River language Tututni (''Dotodəni'', alternatively "Tutudin"), also known as Upper Coquille, (Lower) Rogue River and Nuu-wee-ya, is an Athabaskan language once spoken by three Tututni (Lower Rogue River Athabaskan) tribes: Tututni tribe (including Euchre Cr ...

, Upper Rogue River language and Chetco-Tolowa. The most important documentation of Upper Umpqua is the extensive vocabulary obtained by

Horatio Hale Horatio Emmons Hale (May 3, 1817 – December 28, 1896) was an American-Canadian ethnologist, philologist and businessman. He is known for his study of languages as a key for classifying ancient peoples and being able to trace their migrations. ...

in 1841 (published in Hale 1846).

Melville Jacobs Melville Jacobs (July 3, 1902 – July 31, 1971) was an American anthropologist known for his extensive fieldwork on cultures of the Pacific Northwest. He was born in New York City. After studying with Franz Boas he became a member of the faculty ...

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 ...

were able to collect fragmentary data from the last speakers as late as the 1940s (Golla 2011:70-72). Although known to early explorers and settlers as ''Umpqua,'' the language is now usually called ''Upper Umpqua'' to distinguish it from the unrelated Oregon Coast

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 ''Lower Umpqua'' ( Kuitsh or Siuslaw language) that was spoken closer to the coast in the same area.

References

* Golla, Victor (2011). ''California Indian Languages''. Berkeley: University of California Press. . * Hale, Horatio (1846). ''Ethnography and Philology''. Vol. 6 of ''United States Exploring Expedition.... Under the Command of Charles Wilkes, U.S.N.'' Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard.

External links

Oregon Athabascan languages
{{Athabaskan languages Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages Extinct languages of North America Languages extinct in the 1950s