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

family Family (from ) is a Social group, group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or Affinity (law), affinity (by marriage or other relationship). It forms the basis for social order. Ideally, families offer predictabili ...

of languages spoken in the

Sacramento Valley The Sacramento Valley is the area of the Central Valley of the U.S. state of California that lies north of the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta and is drained by the Sacramento River. It encompasses all or parts of ten Northern California ...

of central

Northern California Northern California (commonly shortened to NorCal) is a geocultural region that comprises the northern portion of the U.S. state of California, spanning the northernmost 48 of the state's List of counties in California, 58 counties. Northern Ca ...

. All Wintuan languages are either

extinct Extinction is the termination of an organism by the death of its Endling, last member. A taxon may become Functional extinction, functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to Reproduction, reproduce 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, inv ...

Classification

Family division

William F. Shipley listed three Wintuan languages in his encyclopedic overview of California Indian languages. More recently,

Marianne Mithun Marianne Mithun ( ; born 1946) is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position sinc ...

split Southern Wintuan into a Patwin language and a Southern Patwin language, resulting in the following classification. * Wintuan ** Northern Wintuan ***

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). There are three major groups that make up the Wi ...

(a.k.a. Wintu proper, Northern Wintu) ***

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) ** Southern Wintuan ***

Patwin The Patwin (also Patween and Southern Wintu) are a band of Wintun people in Northern California. The Patwin comprise the southern branch of the Wintun group, native inhabitants of California since approximately 500. Today, Patwin people are en ...

(a.k.a. Patween) *** Southern Patwin Wintu became extinct with the death of the last fluent speaker in 2003. , Nomlaki has at least one partial speaker. One speaker of Patwin (Hill Patwin dialect) remained in 2003. 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. Wintu proper is the best documented of the four Wintuan languages. Pitkin estimated that the Wintuan languages were about as close to each other as the

Romance languages The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...

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

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 family, language families that includes many Native Americans in the United States, Native American languages of western North America, predominantly spoken at one time in British Columbia, Washington ( ...

language phylum and was one of the five branches of the original ''California kernel'' of Penutian proposed by Roland B. Dixon and Alfred L. Kroeber. However, recent studies suggest that the Wintuans independently entered

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

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 United States. It is a part of the Western U.S., with the Columbia River delineating much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while t ...

. The Wintuan pronominal system closely resembles that of Klamath, while there are numerous lexical resemblances between Northern Wintuan and Alsea that appear to be loans.

References

Bibliography

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External links