Yuki, also known as Ukomno'm, is an

extinct language An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers, especially if the language has no living descendants. In contrast, a dead language is one that is no longer the native language of any community, even if it is still in use, li ...

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 ...

, formerly spoken by the

Yuki people The Yuki (also known as Yukiah) are an indigenous people of California, whose traditional territory is around Round Valley, Mendocino County. Today they are enrolled members of the Round Valley Indian Tribes of the Round Valley Reservation. Before ...

. The Yuki are the original inhabitants of the Eel River area and the

Round Valley Reservation The Round Valley Indian Reservation is a federally recognized Indian reservation lying primarily in northern Mendocino County, California, United States. A small part of it extends northward into southern Trinity County. The total land area, incl ...

of northern California. Yuki ceased to be used as an everyday language in the early 20th century and its last speaker, Arthur Anderson, died in 1983. Yuki is generally thought to be distantly related to the

Wappo language Wappo is an extinct language that was spoken by the Wappo tribe, Native Americans who lived in what is now known as the Alexander Valley north of San Francisco. The last fluent speaker, Laura Fish Somersal, died in 1990. The loss of this language i ...

Classification

Yuki consisted of three dialects, from east to west: Round Valley Yuki, Huchnom (Clear Lake Yuki) and Coast Yuki. These were at least partially

mutually intelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an ...

, but are sometimes counted as distinct languages. These languages are categorized as (Northern) Yukian within the Yuki–Wappo family, which also includes the distant Wappo language. It is thought that the ancestor of the Yukian languages diverged from Wappo around 1500 . The three Yukian languages diverged from each other over the last one thousand years, while dialectal variations in Wappo are even more recent. The most likely catalyst or, at least, influence on the separation of Yukian and Wappo was the expansion of the

Pomo The Pomo are an Indigenous people of California. Historical Pomo territory in Northern California was large, bordered by the Pacific Coast to the west, extending inland to Clear Lake, and mainly between Cleone and Duncans Point. One small grou ...

, leading to ''pomoization'' of the Wappo language and physical separation between the Yuki and the Wappo tribes.

Vocabulary

Yuki had an

octal The octal numeral system, or oct for short, is the radix, base-8 number system, and uses the Numerical digit, digits 0 to 7. This is to say that 10octal represents eight and 100octal represents sixty-four. However, English, like most languages, ...

(base-8) counting system, as the Yuki keep count by using the four spaces between their fingers rather than the fingers themselves. Yuki also had an extensive vocabulary for the plants of

Mendocino County Mendocino County (; ''Mendocino'', Spanish language, Spanish for "of Antonio de Mendoza, Mendoza) is a County (United States), county located on the North Coast (California), North Coast of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 United Sta ...

, California.

Grammar

An extensive reference grammar of Yuki was published in 2016 and is based primarily on the texts and other notes 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 ...

from Yuki speaker Ralph Moore in the first decade of the 20th century as well as elicited material recorded from other speakers later in the 20th century. This grammar also contains sketches of Huchnom and Coast Yuki based on the notes of

Sydney Lamb Sydney MacDonald Lamb (born May 4, 1929 in Denver, Colorado) is an American linguist and professor at Rice University, whose stratificational grammar is a significant alternative theory to Chomsky's transformational grammar. He has speciali ...

and

John Peabody 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 ...

, respectively.

Phonology

An alveolar stop /t/ is an apico-alveolar stop articulated as ̺

References

External links

*
Northern Yukian language
overview at the

Survey of California and Other Indian Languages The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (originally the Survey of California Indian Languages) at the University of California at Berkeley documents, catalogs, and archives the indigenous languages of the Americas. The survey also hosts ...

OLAC resources in and about the Yuki language
Indigenous languages of California Extinct languages of North America Languages extinct in the 20th century Yuki–Wappo languages {{IndigenousAmerican-lang-stub