Information about 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).

All of the Chumashan languages are now extinct, although they are well documented in the unpublished fieldnotes of linguist John Peabody Harrington. Especially well documented are the Barbareño, Ineseño, and Ventureño dialects.The last speaker of a Chumashan language was Barbareño speaker Mary Yee, who died in 1965.

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 subdialects 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. John Peabody Harrington conducted fieldwork on all the above Chumashan languages, but obtained the least data on Island Chumash, Purisimeño and Obispeño.

Obispeño, Purisimeño, Ineseño, Barbareño, and Ventureño are named after the Franciscan missions where they were moved to.

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. 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.

Characteristics

The Chumashan languages are well-known for their consonant harmony (regressive sibilant harmony).

See also

• Chumash people

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.)