Wintuan (also Wintun, Wintoon, Copeh, Copehan) is a family of languages spoken in the Sacramento Valley of central Northern California.
Wintun | |
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Copeh | |
Ethnicity | Wintun people |
Geographic distribution | California |
Linguistic classification | Penutian ?
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Early form | Proto-Wintuan
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Subdivisions |
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Glottolog | wint1258 |
Pre-contact distribution of Wintuan languages |
All Wintuan languages are either extinct or severely endangered.
William F. Shipley listed three Wintuan languages in his encyclopedic overview of California Indian languages.[1] More recently, Marianne Mithun split Southern Wintuan into a Patwin language and a Southern Patwin language, resulting in the following classification.[2]
Wintu became extinct with the death of the last fluent speaker in 2003.[3] As of 2010[update], Nomlaki has at least one partial speaker.[3] One speaker of Patwin (Hill Patwin dialect) remained in 2003.[4] 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.[5][2] 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.[6] 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.[7]
The Wintuan family is usually considered to be a member of the hypothetical Penutian language phylum[8] and was one of the five branches of the original California kernel of Penutian proposed by Roland B. Dixon and Alfred L. Kroeber.[9][10] However, recent studies suggest that the Wintuans independently entered California about 1,500 years ago from an earlier location somewhere in Oregon.[11] 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.[12][13][14]