Wintuan (also Wintun, Wintoon, Copeh, Copehan) is a

family Family (from la, familia) is a Social group, group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or Affinity (law), affinity (by marriage or other relationship). The purpose of the family is to maintain the well-being of its ...

of languages spoken in the

Sacramento Valley , photo =Sacramento Riverfront.jpg , photo_caption= Sacramento , map_image=Map california central valley.jpg , map_caption= The Central Valley of California , location = California, United States , coordinates = , boundaries = Sierra Nevada (ea ...

of central

Northern California Northern California (colloquially known as NorCal) is a geographic and cultural region that generally comprises the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. Spanning the state's northernmost 48 counties, its main population centers incl ...

. All Wintuan languages are either

extinct Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

or severely

endangered An endangered species is a species that is very likely to become extinct in the near future, either worldwide or in a particular political jurisdiction. Endangered species may be at risk due to factors such as habitat loss, poaching and inva ...

Classification

Family division

Shipley (1978:89) listed three Wintuan languages in his encyclopedic overview of California Indian languages. More recently, Mithun (1999) split Southern Wintuan into a Patwin language and a Southern Patwin language, resulting in the following classification. I. Northern Wintuan : 1.

Wintu The Wintu (also Northern Wintun) are Native Americans who live in what is now Northern California. They are part of a loose association of peoples known collectively as the Wintun (or Wintuan). Others are the Nomlaki and the Patwin. The Wintu ...

(a.k.a. Wintu proper, Northern Wintu) ''(†)'' : 2.

Nomlaki The Nomlaki (also Noamlakee, Central Wintu, Nomelaki) are a Wintun people native to the area of the Sacramento Valley, extending westward to the Coast Range in Northern California. Today some Nomlaki people are enrolled in the federally recogniz ...

(a.k.a. Noamlakee, Central Wintu) ''(†)'' II. Southern Wintuan : 3.

Patwin The Patwin (also Patween, Southern Wintu) are a band of Wintun people native to the area of Northern California. The Patwin comprise the southern branch of the Wintun group, native inhabitants of California since approximately 500 AD. The Patwi ...

(a.k.a. Patween) : 4.

Southern Patwin The Patwin (also Patween, Southern Wintu) are a band of Wintun people native to the area of Northern California. The Patwin comprise the southern branch of the Wintun group, native inhabitants of California since approximately 500 AD. The Patwi ...

''(†)'' Wintu became extinct with the death of the last fluent speaker in 2003 (Golla 2011:143). Nomlaki has at least one partial speaker (as of 2010, Golla 2011:143). One speaker of Patwin (Hill Patwin dialect) remained in 2003 (Golla 2011:145). Southern Patwin, once spoken by the Suisun local tribe just northeast of San Francisco Bay, became

in the early 20th century and is thus poorly known (Golla 2011:146; Mithun 1999). Wintu proper is the best documented of the four Wintuan languages. Pitkin (1984) estimated that the Wintuan languages were about as close to each other as the

Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...

. They may have diverged from a common tongue only 2,000 years ago. A comparative study including a reconstruction of Proto-Wintun phonology, morphology and lexicon was undertaken by Shepherd (2006).

Possible relations to external language families

The Wintuan family is usually considered to be a member 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 ...

language phylum (Golla 2011:128-168) and was one of the five branches of the original ''California kernel'' of Penutian proposed by Roland B. Dixon and

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 ...

(1913a, 1913b). However, recent studies suggest that the Wintuans independently entered

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 ...

about 1,500 years ago from an earlier location somewhere in

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 ...

(Golla 2007:75-78). The Wintuan pronominal system closely resembles that of

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 * ...

, while there are numerous lexical resemblances between Northern Wintuan and

Alsea The Alsea are a Native American tribe of Western Oregon. They are (since 1856), confederated with other Tribes on the Siletz Reservation, Oregon, and are members of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz. Their origin story says that the Yaquina, Al ...

that appear to be loans (Golla 1997; DeLancey and Golla 1997; Liedtke 2007).

References

Bibliography

* DeLancey, Scott & Victor Golla (1997). Th
Penutian hypothesis: Retrospect and prospect
''International Journal of American Linguistics'', ''63'', 171-202. * Dixon, Roland B. & Alfred L. Kroeber (1903). The native languages of California. ''American Anthropologist'', ''5'', 1-26. * Dixon, Roland B. & Alfred L. Kroeber (1913a). New linguistic families in California. ''American Anthropologist'', ''15'', 647-655. * Dixon, Roland B. & Alfred L. Kroeber (1913b). Relationship of the Indian languages of California. ''Science'', ''37'', 225. * Dixon, Roland B. & Alfred L. Kroeber (1919). Linguistic families of California. ''University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology'' 16:47-118. Berkeley: University of California. * Golla, Victor (1997). The Alsea-Wintu connection. ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', ''63'', 157-170. * Golla, Victor (2007). Linguistic Prehistory. ''California Prehistory: Colonization, Culture, and Complexity'', pp. 71–82. Terry L. Jones and Kathryn A. Klar, editors. New York: Altamira Press. . * Golla, Victor (2011). ''California Indian languages''. Berkeley: University of California Press. . * Grant, Anthony (1997). Coast Oregon Penutian. ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', ''63'', 144-156. * Liedtke, Stefan (2007).''The Relationship of Wintuan to Plateau Penutian''. LINCOM studies in Native American linguistics, 55. Muenchen: Lincom Europa. * Mithun, Marianne (1999). ''The languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); . * Pitkin, Harvey (1984). ''Wintu grammar''. University of California publications in linguistics (Vol. 94). Berkeley: University of California Press. . * Pitkin, Harvey (1985). ''Wintu dictionary''. University of California publications in linguistics (Vol. 95). Berkeley: University of California Press. . * Schlichter, Alice (1981). ''Wintu Dictionary''. Report #2 of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages. Department of Linguistics, University of California at Berkeley. * Shepherd, Alice (1989). ''Wintu texts''. Berkeley: University of California Press. . * Shipley, William F. (1978). Native Languages of California. ''Handbook of North American Indians'', Vol. 8 (California), pages 80–90. William C. Sturtevant, and Robert F. Heizer, eds. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. / 0160045754. * Shepherd, Alice (2006). ''Proto-Wintun''. University of California publications in linguistics (Vol. 137). Berkeley: University of California Press. *Whistler, Kenneth W. (1977). Wintun Prehistory: An Interpretation based on Linguistic Reconstruction of Plant and Animal Nomenclature. ''Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 19–21.'' pp. 157–174. Berkeley. * Whistler, Kenneth W. (1980). Proto-Wintun kin classification: A case study in reconstruction of a complex semantic system. (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley).

External links

(map after Kroeber)

(Scott DeLancey)

*

{{Authority control *Language Penutian languages Indigenous languages of California Sacramento Valley Language families Endangered indigenous languages of the Americas