Southern Pomo is one of seven mutually unintelligible

Pomoan languages The Pomoan, or Pomo , languages are a small family of seven languages indigenous to northern California spoken by the Pomo people, whose ancestors lived in the valley of the Russian River and the Clear Lake basin. Four languages are extinct, an ...

which were formerly spoken and is currently 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 ...

in Northern California along the Russian River and Clear Lake. The Pomo languages have been grouped together with other so-called

Hokan languages The Hokan language family is a hypothetical grouping of a dozen small language families that were spoken mainly in California, Arizona and Baja California. Etymology The name ''Hokan'' is loosely based on the word for "two" in the various Hokan ...

. Southern Pomo is unique among the Pomo languages in preserving, perhaps, the greatest number of syllables inherited from Proto-Pomo (the

proto-language In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattes ...

from which all seven Pomo languages descend).

The speakers

The speakers of Southern Pomo were never a unified political group; rather, they were spread across a number of villages and spoke slightly different dialects. Southern Pomo speakers did not have a name for their language or themselves. As the southernmost of the Pomo, the speakers of the language were the first to suffer the ravages of Spanish and, later, U.S. invasion. Southern Pomo speakers were used by the Spanish to construct the last of the California missions. The damage done during the Spanish colonial period was compounded by the United States control of California. Only the northernmost populations of Southern Pomo speakers, those of the Dry Creek and Cloverdale dialects, survived to be recorded by the time linguists began to collect data on the language. At least four modern rancherias (the California term for small Indian reservations) include members whose ancestral language was Southern Pomo: Dry Creek, Cloverdale, Lytton and Graton. In 2012 there was one fluent speaker, from Dry Creek, one rememberer, and a handful of people who learned some vocabulary as children.

Work on the language

A small amount of data was collected by early researchers such as

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 ...

; however, extensive work was not carried out until Abraham M. Halpern, in the 1940s, collected a number of Southern Pomo words and texts as part of a larger effort to collect data on all the Pomo languages. Halpern published one article, ''Southern Pomo h and ʔ and Their Reflexes'', which dealt with aspects of Southern Pomo

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

. Halpern's unpublished notes are currently housed at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. Robert L. Oswalt, who wrote a grammar of the related Kashaya (Southwestern Pomo) language, began to collect Southern Pomo data approximately twenty years after Halpern's fieldwork. Oswalt eventually published one glossed and translated text, ''Retribution for Mate-Stealing: A Southern Pomo Tale'', as well as a number of other articles which included Southern Pomo data together with data from other Pomo languages. Though Oswalt did a large amount of work on a Southern Pomo dictionary, it has never been completed.

Phonetics and phonology

Southern Pomo has a rich sound system with aspirated, unaspirated, ejective and voiced stops. It has a total of 28 consonants (plus the pseudo-consonant ). The vowel system, in contrast, contains only five qualities: . All phonemes, both consonants and vowels, can occur long. The full consonant inventory is laid out below.

Consonants

Language revitalization efforts

In 2011 the Dry Creek Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians hired Dr. Neil Alexander Walker to develop a language restoration program for Southern Pomo, one that is currently active and includes classes,
mobile application
signage placed on ancestral lands, summer youth day camps focused on traditional Pomo foods, and aids such as posters and coloring books. As of 2012, fewer than three first-language speakers are known to survive, none younger than 90. There is currently a core group of heritage speakers from several tribes who are seriously involved in learning the language. As of 2021 there are two Southern Pomo apps available. One called Learn Southern Pomo Alphabet and another one called Southern Pomo Language Intro.

References

External links

Southern Pomo Language Project
at the Western Institute for Endangered Language Documentation
Southern Pomo language
overview at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
Resources in and about the Southern Pomo languageSouthern Pomo, California Language ArchivesOLAC resources in and about the Southern Pomo languageSouthern Pomo at the California Language Archive
{{DEFAULTSORT:Southern Pomo Language Indigenous languages of California Pomoan languages Endangered indigenous languages of the Americas Native American language revitalization