Penutian Language

The Penutian languages are a classification of Native American languages that were spoken among the people of Western North America. Penutian was originally meant to categorize the language of five Native American groups from California but was later expanded to include several others in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Mexico. Over the years, the classification of Penutian languages has divided linguists. Some have argued against the original expansion while others pushed for the inclusion of additional languages. Newer evidence suggests that Native American migration may be responsible for some of the language similarities, further redefining the Penutian grouping.

Many of the individual languages in the family are extinct, and others are facing extinction. A language is classified as extinct when it has no native speakers.

History and Classification

The first indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere are believed to have migrated from Asia across the Bering Land Bridge during the last ice age more than 15,000 years ago. These nomadic groups eventually spread out and settled in North and South America, developing diverse cultures and languages.

When European settlers arrived in North America in the fifteenth century, an estimated fifty million indigenous people were living in the Americas. Native Americans on the West Coast of North America first encountered Europeans in the late eighteenth century when Spanish and Russian explorers journeyed to the region. At that time, the Native Americans in the area that would become California had developed about ninety languages with more than one hundred and fifty dialects.

The first attempt to categorize these languages was published in 1891 by John Wesley Powell, a former army major who spent years studying Native American culture. His work was called the Powell Classification and placed the region’s native languages into twenty subsets.

In 1913, anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Roland Dixon published a new classification of Native American languages from California. Refining Powell’s work, they invented the term Penutian to describe the languages spoken by five California tribes—Maiduan, Miwok, Costanoan, Wintuan, and Yokutsan. The term is derived from a combination of the words Pen, taken from Maiduan, Wintuan, and Yokutsan; and Uti, from Miwok and Costanoan. Pen and Uti are common stem words for "two" in their respective languages. Kroeber and Dixon determined these five tribes shared several genetic linguistic traits, including similar stem words, verbal inflections, and basic constructions, suggesting a common historical origin.

In 1921, the anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir felt the common linguistic influences found in the Penutian languages extended to more than just the five California groups. Sapir expanded Kroeber and Dixon’s classification to include several other Native American languages spoken among tribes from California up the West Coast to Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Sapir’s initial classifications included California Penutian, Oregon Penutian, Chinookan, Tsimshian, and Plateau Penutian.

Within the California Penutian language were four derivations: Utian, which was used by the Miwok and Costanoan people; Yokutsan, which was spoken by the Yokuts of central and northern California; Maiduan, which was used by the Maidu, Nisenan, and Konkow; and Wintuan, which was spoken by the Nomlaki, Patwin, and Wintu.

Oregon Penutian was the basis for Takelma, which was spoken by the Takelma of central and southeastern Oregon; Coastal Oregon Penutian, which was made up of the Coosan, Siuslawan, and Alsea languages; and Kalapuyan, which was used in western Oregon and was closely related to Takelma.

Chinookan was spoken by the Chinook tribe of the Washington coast, and Tsimshian was used in the Pacific Northwest, British Columbia, and Alaska.

Plateau Penutian influenced Sahaptian, which was spoken by the people of the Columbia Plateau in the Pacific Northwest; Molala-Cayuse, which was used in central Oregon; and Klamath-Modoc, which was spoken in the Klamath basin of Oregon.

Eight years after his initial ordering, Sapir added two more languages to the Penutian classification, which were both derived from Mexican Penutian: Mixe-Zoque, which was used by the native people of southern Mexico, and Huave, which was spoken in southeastern Mexico.

Sapir’s redefined version of Penutian languages was met with resistance by Alfred Kroeber. For years, Kroeber refused to acknowledge the wider definition of Penutian, using it exclusively to refer to the original five California languages.

In the 1930s, two linguists, George Trager and Benjamin Whorf, argued that the Penutian classification should be further expanded to include Mayan and Uto-Aztecan languages. This proposed Macro- Penutian grouping has not been generally accepted by linguistic experts.

Researchers in the 1970s suggested modifying the Penutian classification based on evidence that some of the language similarities occurred because of Native American migration and the borrowing of words between tribes. They theorized the native people of California moved there from the plateau region of Oregon and Washington and that their languages are not distinct descendants from a common ancestor. As a result of this research, some linguists no longer include the California languages Utian, Yokutsan, Maiduan, and Wintuan in the Penutian grouping.

Geographic Distribution and Modern Usage

The Penutian languages were spoken among Native Americans in western and southwestern North America and parts of Mexico. It is difficult to estimate how many native people spoke the languages. The native population of the area has been greatly reduced during the past two centuries by disease and European expansion. It is estimated there were two hundred thousand Native Americans living in California alone in 1800. By 1900, there were fifteen only thousand.

In the twenty-first century, many of the Penutian languages are extinct and others are endangered. Some, such as the Tsimshian language, are spoken by just a few hundred people. Other languages are known by only a handful of tribal elders. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the Klamath language of the Columbia Plateau was spoken by just one person. Only four of the surviving language branches are spoken by more than one hundred and fifty people.

Bibliography

DeLancey, Scott, and Victor Golla. "The Penutian Hypothesis: Retrospect and Prospect." International Jour. of American Linguistics 63.1 (Jan. 1997): 171–202. Print.

Golla, Victor. California Indian Languages. Berkeley: U of California P, 2011. Print.

Golla, Victor. "The History of the Term ‘Penutian.’" Survey of California and Other Indian Languages. 2002. Web. 14 Sept. 2015.<http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~survey/documents/survey-reports/survey-report-11.03-golla.pdf>.

"Native American Cultures." History. A&E television Networks, 2015. Web. 14 Sept. 2015. <http://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/native-american-cultures>.

Silver, Shirley, and Wick R. Miller. American Indian Languages. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1997. Print.

"Vocabulary Words in the Penutian Language Family." Native-Languages. Native Languages of the Americas, 2015. Web. 14 Sept. 2015.<http://www.native-languages.org/fampen‗words.htm>.