• Source: Chumashan languages

Chumashan is an extinct and revitalizing family of languages that were spoken on the southern California coast by Native American Chumash people, from the Coastal plains and valleys of San Luis Obispo to Malibu, neighboring inland and Transverse Ranges valleys and canyons east to bordering the San Joaquin Valley, to three adjacent Channel Islands: San Miguel, Santa Rosa, and Santa Cruz.
The Chumashan languages may be, along with Yukian and perhaps languages of southern Baja California such as Waikuri, one of the oldest language families established in California, before the arrival of speakers of Penutian, Uto-Aztecan, and perhaps even Hokan languages. Chumashan, Yukian, and southern Baja languages are spoken in areas with long-established populations of a distinct physical type. The population in the core Chumashan area has been stable for the past 10,000 years. However, the attested range of Chumashan is recent (within a couple thousand years). There is internal evidence that Obispeño replaced a Hokan language and that Island Chumash mixed with a language very different from Chumashan; the islands were not in contact with the mainland until the introduction of plank canoes in the first millennium AD.
Although some say the Chumashan languages are now extinct or dormant, language revitalization programs are underway with four of these Chumashan languages. These languages are well-documented in the unpublished fieldnotes of linguist John Peabody Harrington. Especially well documented are Barbareño, Ineseño, and Ventureño. The last native speaker of a Chumashan language was Barbareño speaker Mary Yee, who died in 1965.




Family division






= Languages

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Six Chumashan languages are attested, all now extinct. However, most of them are in the process of revitalization, with language programs and classes. Contemporary Chumash people now prefer to refer to their languages by native names rather than the older names based on the local missions.

Obispeño was the most divergent Chumashan language. The Central Chumash languages include Purisimeño, Ineseño, Barbareño and Ventureño. There was a dialect continuum across this area, but the form of the language spoken in the vicinity of each mission was distinct enough to qualify as a different language.
There is very little documentation of Purisimeño. Ineseño, Barbareño and Ventureño each had several dialects, although documentation usually focused on just one. Island Chumash had different dialects on Santa Cruz Island and Santa Rosa Island, but all speakers were relocated to the mainland in the early 19th century. John Peabody Harrington conducted fieldwork on all the above Chumashan languages, but obtained the least data on Island Chumash, Purisimeño, and Obispeño. There is no linguistic data on Cuyama, though ethnographic data suggests that it was likely Chumash (Interior Chumash).



Post-contact

The languages are named after the local Franciscan Spanish missions in California where Chumashan speakers were relocated and aggregated between the 1770s and 1830s:

Obispeño—Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa
Purisimeño—Mission La Purísima Concepción
Ineseño—Mission Santa Inés
Barbareño—Mission Santa Barbara
Ventureño—Mission San Buenaventura



Genetic relations

Roland Dixon and Alfred L. Kroeber suggested that the Chumashan languages might be related to the neighboring Salinan in a Iskoman grouping. Edward Sapir accepted this speculation and included Iskoman in his classification of Hokan. More recently it has been noted that Salinan and Chumashan shared only one word, which the Chumashan languages probably borrowed from Salinan (the word for 'white clam shell', which was used as currency). As a result, the inclusion of Chumashan into Hokan is now disfavored by most specialists, and the consensus is that Chumashan has no identified linguistic relatives.




Characteristics


The Chumashan languages are well known for their consonant harmony (regressive sibilant harmony). Mithun presents a scholarly synopsis of Chumashan linguistic structures.




= Vowels

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The Central Chumash languages all have a symmetrical six-vowel system. The distinctive high central vowel is written various ways, including <ɨ> "barred I," <ə> "schwa" and <ï> "I umlaut." Contemporary users of the languages favor /ɨ/ or /ə/.

Striking features of this system include

Low-vowel harmony within morphemes: Within a single morpheme, adjacent low vowels match: they are both or all front /e/, central /a/ or back /o/. Pan-Central examples:
expeč "to sing" — I/B/V
ʼosos "heel" — I/B/V
ʼasas "chin" — I/B/V
Low-vowel harmony as a process: Many prefixes include a low vowel which shows up as /a/ when the vowel of the following syllable is high. When the vowel of the following syllable is low, the vowel of the prefix assimilates to (or "harmonizes" with) the front-central-back quality of the following vowel. The verb prefix kal- "of cutting" illustrates this process in the following Barbareño examples, where the /l/ may drop out:
kamasix "to cut into three pieces" — kal- + masix "three"
keseqen "to cut out" — kal- + seqen "to remove"
qoloq " to make or bore a hole, cut a hole in — kal- + loq "to be perforated"
katun "to cut into two pieces" — kal- + =tun "of two, being two"




= Consonants

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The Central Chumash languages have a complex inventory of consonants. All of the consonants except /h/ can be glottalized; all of the consonants except /h/, /x/ and the liquids can be aspirated.




Proto-language



Proto-Chumash reconstructions by Klar (1977):




See also


Rock art of the Chumash people
Burro Flats Painted Cave
Population of Native California
Native Americans in the United States




Notes






Bibliography



Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
Dixon, Roland R.; & Kroeber, Alfred L. (1913). New Linguistic Families in California. American Anthropologist 15:647-655.
Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996). Languages. Handbook of North American Indians (W. C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-16-048774-9.
Klar, Kathryn. (1977). Topics in historical Chumash grammar. (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley).
Kroeber, Alfred Louis (1910). The Chumash and Costanoan languages. Berkeley, The University Press. Retrieved 2012-08-26.
Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
Grant, Campbell. (1978). Chumash:Introduction. In California Handbook of North American Indians (William C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) Vol. 8 (Robert F. Heizer, Volume Ed.). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution.
Sapir, Edward. (1917). The Position of Yana in the Hokan Stock. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and ethnology 13:1–34. Berkeley: University of California.

Kata Kunci Pencarian:

• Bahasa di Amerika Serikat
• California
• Mimbar (Umum)
• Ethnologue
• Kantilasi
• Chumashan languages
• Quaternary numeral system
• Hokan languages
• Purisimeño language
• Tongva language
• Barbareño language
• Chumash
• Ventureño language
• Cruzeño language
• Mary Yee