Pre-contact distribution of Chumashan languages

Chumashan is a family of languages that were spoken on the southern California coast (from San Luis Obispo to Malibu), in neighboring inland regions (San Joaquin Valley), and on three nearby islands (San Miguel, Santa Rosa, and Santa Cruz). Image File history File links Chumash_langs. ... Image File history File links Chumash_langs. ... Official language(s) English Capital Sacramento Largest city Los Angeles Area  Ranked 3rd  - Total 158,302 sq mi (410,000 km²)  - Width 250 miles (400 km)  - Length 770 miles (1,240 km)  - % water 4. ... San Luis Obispo, San Luis, or SLO (Spanish for ) is a city in California. ... The Malibu pier near the famous Surfrider Beach Dawn in the Santa Monica Mountains The Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) in central Malibu The Paradise Cove pier in Malibu Malibu is a city located in western Los Angeles County, California, United States. ... The eight-county San Joaquin Valley is the part of the Central Valley of California that lies south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in Stockton. ... Aerial view of San Miguel San Miguel Island is the westernmost of Californias Channel Islands and the sixth-largest of the eight at 9,325 acres (37. ... Santa Rosa Island Santa Rosa Island is the second largest of the Channel Islands of California at 52,794 acres (21,365 hectares). ... NASA satellite image of Santa Cruz Island. ...

The entire Chumashan family is now extinct. The last speaker of a Chumashan language was Mary Yee who died in 1965 and spoke Barbareño. An extinct language (also called a dead language) is a language which no longer has any native speakers. ... 1965 (MCMLXV) was a common year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1965 calendar). ...

Family division

Chumashan consists of 6 languages.

I. Northern Chumash

1. Obispeño (also known as Northern Chumash) (†)

II. Southern Chumash

a. Island Chumash

2. Island Chumash (also known as Ysleño, Isleño) (†)

b. Central Chumash

3. Purisimeño (†)

4. Ineseño (also known as Inezeño) (†)

5. Barbareño (†)

6. Ventureño (†)

Obispeño was the most divergent Chumashan language. Ineseño and Barbareño may have been dialects of the same language. There is very little documentation of Purisimeño. There were several different dialects of Ventureño. Island Chumash had different subdialects spoken on Santa Cruz Island and Santa Rosa Island, but all its speakers were relocated to the mainland in the early 1800s. Ventureño is one of the extinct Chumash languages, a group of Native American languages previously spoken along the coastal areas of Southern California from as far north as San Luis Obispo to as far south as Malibu. ... NASA satellite image of Santa Cruz Island. ... There are at least two Santa Rosa Islands: Santa Rosa Island, California is one of the Channel Islands of California. ...

Obispeño, Purisimeño, Ineseño, Barbareño, and Ventureño are named after the Franciscan missions where they were moved to. The Order of Friars Minor and other Franciscan movements are disciples of Saint Francis of Assisi. ... A Christian mission has been widely defined, since the Lausanne Congress of 1974, as that which is designed to form a viable indigenous church-planting movement. ...

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 classfication of Hokan. Afterwards, Kathryn Klar (1977) found that Salinan and Chumashan shared only one word, which the Chumashan languages probably borrowed from Salinan (the word meant 'white clam shell' and 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 linguistic relatives. Alfred Louis Kroeber Alfred Louis Kroeber (June 11, 1876–October 5, 1960) was one of the most influential figures in American anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century. ... The Salinan Native Americans lived in what is now Northern California, in the Salinas Valley. ... Edward Sapir. ... The Hokan language family is a hypothetical grouping of a dozen small language families spoken in California and Mexico. ... For the album by Ash, see 1977 (album). ...

Characteristics

The Chumashan languages are well-known for their consonant harmony (regressive sibilant harmony). A language is said to possess consonant harmony when it has a phonological rule requiring some types of consonants in a word to belong to the same class. ...

See also

• Chumash.

Rafael, a Chumash in the 1800s Pre-contact distribution of the Chumash The Chumash Indians, a Native American tribe, mainly inhabited the southern coastal regions of California, in the vicinity of what is now Santa Barbara and Ventura, extending as far south as Malibu. ...

Bibliography

• Applegate, Richard. (1972) Ineseño Chumash Grammar. (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley).
• Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
• 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).
• Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
• Sturtevant, William C. (Ed.). (1978-present). Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 1-20). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. (Vols. 1-3, 16, 18-20 not yet published).
• Wash, Suzanne. (1995). Productive Reduplication in Barbareño Chumash. (Master's thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara; 210 + x pp.)
• Wash, Suzanne. (2001). Adverbial Clauses in Barbareño Chumash Narrative Discourse. (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara; 569 + xxii pp.)