Wintuan languages

Wintuan (also Wintun, Wintoon, Copeh, Copehan) is a family of languages spoken in the Sacramento Valley of central Northern California.

All Wintuan languages are either extinct or severely endangered.

Classification

Family division

William F. Shipley listed three Wintuan languages in his encyclopedic overview of California Indian languages.Template:Sfn More recently, Marianne Mithun split Southern Wintuan into a Patwin language and a Southern Patwin language, resulting in the following classification.Template:Sfn

• Wintuan
  • Northern Wintuan
    • Wintu (a.k.a. Wintu proper, Northern Wintu) Template:Extinct
    • Nomlaki (a.k.a. Noamlakee, Central Wintu) Template:Extinct
  • Southern Wintuan
    • Patwin (a.k.a. Patween)
    • Southern Patwin Template:Extinct

Wintu became extinct with the death of the last fluent speaker in 2003.Template:Sfn since 2010Template:Dated maintenance category (articles), Nomlaki has at least one partial speaker.Template:Sfn One speaker of Patwin (Hill Patwin dialect) remained in 2003.Template:Sfn Southern Patwin, once spoken by the Suisun local tribe just northeast of San Francisco Bay, became extinct in the early 20th century and is thus poorly known.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn

Possible relations to external language families

The Wintuan family is usually considered to be a member of the hypothetical Penutian language phylumTemplate:Sfn and was one of the five branches of the original California kernel of Penutian proposed by Roland B. Dixon and Alfred L. Kroeber.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn However, recent studies suggest that the Wintuans independently entered California about 1,500 years ago from an earlier location somewhere in Oregon.Template:Sfn 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.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Further reading

• Template:Cite thesis

External links

• Native Tribes, Groups, Language Families and Dialects of California in 1770 (map after Kroeber)
• Morphological Parallels between Klamath and Wintu (Scott DeLancey)
• The Wintu Language Project
• Wintu (Wintun)
  • Wintu vocabulary words