The Pomoan, or Pomo , languages are a small family of seven languages indigenous to northern

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

spoken by the

Pomo people 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 gr ...

, whose ancestors lived in the valley of the Russian River and the Clear Lake basin. Four languages are extinct, and all surviving languages except Kashaya have fewer than ten speakers.

Geographical distribution

John Wesley Powell John Wesley Powell (March 24, 1834 – September 23, 1902) was an American geologist, U.S. Army soldier, explorer of the American West, professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and director of major scientific and cultural institutions. He ...

, who was the first to define the extent of the family, noted that its boundaries were the Pacific Ocean to the west, Wintuan territory in the Sacramento Valley to the east, the head of the Russian River to the north, and

Bodega Head Bodega Head is a small promontory on the Pacific coast of northern California in the United States. It is located in Sonoma County at , approximately northwest of San Francisco and approximately west of Santa Rosa. The peninsula, which is ap ...

and present-day

Santa Rosa Santa Rosa is the Italian, Portuguese and Spanish name for Saint Rose. Santa Rosa may also refer to: Places Argentina *Santa Rosa, Mendoza, a city * Santa Rosa, Tinogasta, Catamarca * Santa Rosa, Valle Viejo, Catamarca * Santa Rosa, La Pampa * S ...

to the south (Powell 1891:87-88). Only

Northeastern Pomo Northeastern Pomo, also known as Salt Pomo, is a Pomoan language of Northern California. There are no living fluent speakers. It was spoken along Stony Creek, a tributary of the Sacramento River. Northeastern was one of seven mutually unintellig ...

was not contiguous with the other Pomoan languages, being separated by an intervening region of Wintuan speakers.

Internal relationships of languages

Pomoan is a family of seven languages. Their relationship to one another was first formally recognized by

, who proposed that they be called the "Kulanapan Family" (Powell 1891). Like many of Powell's obscure nomenclatural proposals, particularly for California languages, "Kulanapan" was ignored. In its place,

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 ...

, the term used by Indians and Whites alike for

Northern Pomo Northern Pomo is a critically endangered Pomoan language, spoken by the indigenous Pomo people in what is now called California. The speakers of Northern Pomo were traditionally those who lived in the northern and largest area of the Pomoan terr ...

, was arbitrarily extended to include the rest of the family. All seven languages were first systematically identified as Pomo by

Samuel Barrett Samuel Alfred Barrett (1879 in Conway, Alaska – 1965) was an anthropologist and linguist who studied Native American peoples. Education Barrett received all three of his degrees from UC Berkeley—B.S. in 1905, M.S. in 1906, and a doctorate i ...

(1908). To avoid complications, Barrett named each of the Pomoan languages according to its geographic position ("Northern Pomo," "Southeastern Pomo," etc.) This naming convention quickly gained wide acceptance and is still in general use, except for the substitution of "Kashaya" for Barrett's "Southwestern Pomo". Barrett's geographical language names often lead those unfamiliar with the Pomoan languages to the misconception that they are dialects of a single "Pomo" language. Various genetic subgroupings of the family have been proposed, although the general outlines have remained fairly consistent. The current consensus view (cf. Mithun 1999) favors the tree presented in Oswalt (1964), shown below. * Southeastern Pomo *

Eastern Pomo Eastern Pomo, also known as Clear Lake Pomo, is a nearly extinct Pomoan language spoken around Clear Lake in Lake County, California by one of the Pomo peoples. It is not mutually intelligible with the other Pomoan languages. Before contact wi ...

† *

† * Western **

† ** Southern *** Central Pomo † ***

Southern Pomo Southern Pomo is one of seven mutually unintelligible Pomoan languages which were formerly spoken and is currently spoken by the Pomo people in Northern California along the Russian River and Clear Lake. The Pomo languages have been grouped to ...

† *** Kashaya (Southwestern Pomo) Pomoan family tree

Essentially identical versions of this classifications are presented in Oswalt and McLendon's "Introduction" to the Pomo chapters in Heizer, ed. (1978) and in Campbell (1997). The most important dissenter was Abraham M. Halpern, one of the few linguists since Barrett's time to collect comparative data on all of the Pomoan languages. Halpern's classification differed from Oswalt's mainly in the placement of

. Instead of considering it an independent branch of the family, Halpern grouped it with the languages of Oswalt's "Western" branch. He suggested the possibility that Northeastern Pomo represents a recent migration of a

subgroup (Halpern 1964; Golla 2011:106-7).

Proto-language

Proto-Pomo reconstructions by McLendon (1973):McLendon, Sally. 1973. ''Proto Pomo''. (University of California publications in linguistics, 71.) Berkeley: University of California Press. :

Notes

References

* Barrett, Samuel A. (1908). ''The Ethno-Geography of the Pomo and Neighboring Indians''. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, 6

* Campbell, Lyle. (1997). ''American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America''. New York: Oxford University Press. . * Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996). ''Languages''. Handbook of North American Indians (W. C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. . * Golla, Victor. (2011). ''California Indian Languages.'' Berkeley: University of California Press. . * McLendon, Sally & Robert L. Oswalt (1978). "Pomo: Introduction". In ''California'', ed. Robert F. Heizer. Vol. 8 of ''Handbook of North American Indians'', ed. William C. Sturtevant, pp. 274–88. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. . * Mithun, Marianne. (1999). ''The languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); . * Powell, John Wesley. (1891). ''Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico''. Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 7:1-142. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office

*

External links