Oregon Penutian is a language family in the Penutian language phylum comprising languages spoken at one time by several groups of Native Americans in present-day western Oregon and western Washington in the United States. Various languages in the family are divided by dialects that are in most cases identical to the various identified tribal bands in the region. The languages were spoken largely along both banks of the lower and middle Columbia River, in the Willamette Valley, in the Oregon Cascade Range, along the Oregon Coast, and in the valleys of the Umpqua and Rogue rivers. The area in which the languages were spoken includes the most populated areas of Oregon today.
Linguists are not in complete agreement over the classification of languages in this family. In classifications, the languages of the family are classified in several distinct families. Some linguists classify Lower and Middle Chinookan as belong to a distinct family called the Chinookan languages.
Languages in the Oregon Penutian family (with their identified dialects and area of speech in the 19th century) include:
Lower (Coastal) Chinookan
Shoalwater dialect, spoken in southwestern Washington around southern Willapa Bay.
It may be a standard language-for example, English and French are often used for international diplomacy, and Swahili is used by speakers of the many different local languages of eastern Africa.
French was the language of diplomacy in Europe from the 17th century until its recent replacement by English, and as a result is still the working language of international institutions and is seen on documents ranging from passports to airmail letters.
This mixed language (pidgin, creole language) was used for communication throughout the medieval and early modern Middle East as a diplomatic language; the generic description "lingua franca" has since become common for any language used by speakers of different languages to communicate with one another.
Similarly, a proto-Altaic language spoken by the members of an Altaic community who became separated from each other, in time by thousands of years and in space by thousands of kilometres, would definitely develop independently of each other in a way that when examined at present, they would appear alien to each other.
In spite of the evolutionary forces that act upon a language and cause changes in its structure and in the pronunciation of its words, one can still recognise these two words in languages which are related to each other.
However as the language develops in time, the vowels in a word may change into other vowels such as "a" into "e", "o", "u" while consonants of the words, in general, would tend to maintain their identity in the word through time.