Penutian Language Family
The Penutian language family is a significant linguistic grouping that encompasses several language families, often referred to as a language phylum or Macro-Penutian. Predominantly spoken by indigenous communities along the Northwest Coast, especially in Oregon, Penutian includes various families such as Chinookan, Takelman, Alsean, and Kusan, as well as their respective dialects. The family is noted for its rich cultural heritage, with languages that reflect the maritime and riverine environments of its speakers. Historically, evidence suggests that these languages may have originated from migrations into the Northwest Coast from regions in Central America or the South Pacific.
Many of the languages within the Penutian family are considered extinct, with no fluent native speakers remaining, although some revival efforts and second-language speakers are active in preserving aspects of these languages. The cultural practices associated with the Penutian-speaking peoples often included close-knit communities residing along water bodies, with a history of interactions with neighboring groups. While some languages related to Penutian are still spoken among Columbia Basin tribes, the classification and relationships between these languages and cultures raise discussions, particularly among the descendants of the original speakers. Overall, the Penutian language family represents a crucial piece of the linguistic and cultural landscape of the Northwest Coast.
Penutian Language Family
Culture area: Northwest Coast
Tribes affected: Alsea, Cayuse, Chinook, Coos, Costanoan, Klamath, Maidu, Miwok, Modoc, Molala, Nez Perce, Takelma, Tsimshian, Wasco, Yokuts, other Northwest Coast and California tribes
The Penutian language family is large enough that many scholars call it a language phylum—a unit including a number of language families; it is sometimes referred to as Macro-Penutian. Penutian is composed of several families, subfamilies, branches, and dialects and is spoken by many people in the Northwest Coast cultural area, primarily those people living in Oregon, especially along the coast. According to John Powell (1891), isolates of the language system may be spoken to the south by some Californian peoples (Costanoan, Maidu, Miwok, Wintun, and Yokuts), and possibly as far south as Guatemala among the Maya.
Eastward and inland, the speakers of the Athapaskan language family and Siouan language family dominated. North of the Columbia River, speakers of the Salishan languages were in the majority. Regional trade languages such as Chinook jargon also developed across the Columbia Plateau in response to the need for commerce between diverse groups of unrelated stock. At the time of first contact with whites in the early 1800’s, tribal informants used Chinook jargon to communicate with the explorers.
Penutian language families are thought to include Chinookan, Takelman, Alsean, and Kusan. Oregon and Coastal Oregon Penutian includes Yakonan as well. Chinookan branches include Upper and Lower Chinookan and the Cathlamet, Multnomah, and Kiksht dialects.
The Takelman family includes the subfamilies of Takelma and Kalapuyan and the Tualatin-Yamhill, Central Kalapuyan and Yoncalla branches. The Alsean family includes the Alsea and Yaquina subfamilies. There is a Siuslaw language isolate that includes the Siuslaw and Lower Umpqua dialects of Yakonan, which are also related to the Kusan language family and its branch isolates of Miluk and Hanis.
These languages and their more distant inland relatives, especially Klamat-Sahaptian (Cayuse, Klikitat, Molala, Nez Perce, Palouse, Umatilla, Walla Walla, and Yakima), are spoken as far north as the Columbia River basin and inland into the territories of the Yakima, Wasco, and Nez Perce tribes.
The people who spoke Penutian languages were the southernmost peoples to practice head-flattening. They did not have totemic clan systems. They usually lived in small settlements along streams, rivers, and bays with blood relations, and they usually married outside their own immediate group. Their myths and traditional culture show evidence of substantial contact with Californian peoples to the south and, to a lesser degree, with peoples from the Salishan language family to the north.
Some evidence suggests that speakers of these languages may have migrated into the Northwest Coast culture area from central America or southern Mexico and may have originally come into the Americas from the South Pacific rather than across Beringia, the Bering land bridge.
Other evidence, however, suggests that Penutian speakers migrated into the coastal areas and river basins from the north. Tribal stories suggest that the peoples who spoke Penutian languages were created in, and have always resided in, the territories they occupy today. Thus the origins of the language phylum are still uncertain, but collected texts give evidence of its origins in the sea. It is rich in myths, legends, and stories reflective of the maritime, estuarine, and riverine environments its speakers occupied, and which their descendants still occupy today.
The first major work in the study of these languages was done by Powell in the late nineteenth century. Leo Frachtenberg, in the texts he collected (1913, 1914), compared the Miluk and Hanis dialects of the Kusan family and in later work included vocabularies and a listing of formative elements. Melville Jacobs, in his work of 1939 and 1940, made recordings of, and commentaries on, the vocabularies, structure, and contents of many of the Alsean and Siuslaw isolates as well as Kusan dialects.
Penutian languages have some features in common with Plateau, Californian, and Subarctic language families, but they have other elements which make them unique among the languages of the world and specific to the coastal cultures of Oregon. Most of the languages in the Penutian phylum are considered to be extinct; there are no longer any living native speakers of coastal Oregon languages in this phylum, although some attempts at revival have been made, and some second-language speakers continue working to maintain what remains of them.
Related languages, spoken among the Columbia Basin peoples, are still in use today, although for the most part they exist as artifacts, testimony to a way of life forever departed from the lands of the Northwest. It must be noted that living descendants of the tribes which spoke, or which may still speak, these languages often dispute the assumed relationships between languages and cultures supposed to be true by the classification systems of the dominant American culture.