Sahaptian (also Sahaptianic, Sahaptin, Shahaptian) is a two-language branch of the

Plateau Penutian Plateau Penutian (also Shahapwailutan, Lepitan) is a family of languages spoken in northern California, reaching through central-western Oregon to northern Washington and central-northern Idaho. Family division Plateau Penutian consists of four ...

family spoken by Native American peoples in the

Columbia Plateau The Columbia Plateau is a geologic and geographic region that lies across parts of the U.S. states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. It is a wide flood basalt plateau between the Cascade Range and the Rocky Mountains, cut through by the Columbia ...

region of

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...

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 ...

, and

Idaho Idaho ( ) is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. To the north, it shares a small portion of the Canada–United States border with the province of British Columbia. It borders the states of Montana and Wyom ...

in the northwestern

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

. The terms ''Sahaptian'' (the family) and ''Sahaptin'' (the language) have often been confused and used interchangeably in the literature.

Family division

Sahaptian includes two languages: :1.

Nez Perce The Nez Percé (; autonym in Nez Perce language: , meaning "we, the people") are an Indigenous people of the Plateau who are presumed to have lived on the Columbia River Plateau in the Pacific Northwest region for at least 11,500 years.Ames, K ...

(''Niimiipuutímt'') :2.

Sahaptin The Sahaptin are a number of Native American tribes who speak dialects of the Sahaptin language. The Sahaptin tribes inhabited territory along the Columbia River and its tributaries in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Sahaptin-s ...

(''Sħáptənəxw'') Nez Perce has two principle dialects, Upper and Lower. Sahaptin has somewhat greater internal diversity, with its main dialects being Umatilla and

Yakima Yakima ( or ) is a city in and the county seat of Yakima County, Washington, and the state's 11th-largest city by population. As of the 2020 census, the city had a total population of 96,968 and a metropolitan population of 256,728. The uninco ...

. Nodel Rude's (2012) classification of Sahaptian is as follows. *Proto-Sahaptian **

***''

Columbia River The Columbia River (Upper Chinook: ' or '; Sahaptin: ''Nch’i-Wàna'' or ''Nchi wana''; Sinixt dialect'' '') is the largest river in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. The river rises in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, C ...

'' dialect ***''Northern'' dialect ****''Northwest'' dialect ****''Northeast'' dialect

Proto-language

Work on Proto-Sahaptian reconstruction has been undertaken by Noel Rude (2006,Rude, Noel. 2006
Proto-Sahaptian vocalism
In ''Papers for the 41st International Conference on Salish and neighbouring languages'', 264-277. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. 2012Rude, Noel. 2012
Reconstructing Proto-Sahaptian Sounds
In ''Papers for the 47th International Conference on Salish and neighbouring languages'', 292-324. Working Papers in Linguistics (UBCWPL). Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.). Proto-Sahaptian consonants: : Proto-Sahaptian vowels: :

Bibliography

* Aoki, Haruo (1963). On Sahaptian-Klamath Linguistic Affiliations. ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 29, no. 2: 107–112. * Aoki, Haruo (1966). Nez Percé vowel harmony and proto-Sahaptian vowels. ''Language'', ''42'', 759-767. * Aoki, Haruo (1970). ''Nez Percé grammar''. University of California publications in linguistics (Vol. 62). Berkeley: University of California Press. . * Mithun, Marianne (1999). ''The languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); . * Rigsby, Bruce (1965). Continuity and change in Sahaptian vowel systems. ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', ''31'', 306-311. * Rigsby, Bruce; & Silverstein, Michael (1969). Nez Percé vowels and proto-Sahaptian vowel harmony. ''Language'', ''45'', 45-59. * Rude, Noel. (2012). Reconstructing Proto-Sahaptian Sounds. ''University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics'', Vol. 32, pp. 292–324. Papers for the Forty-seventh International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages, Cranbrook, British Columbia, Canada, August 3–5, 2012, edited by Joel Dunham, John Lyon & Natalie Weber.

References

{{Penutian languages Language families Plateau Penutian languages Indigenous languages of the North American Plateau Indigenous languages of the United States