The Speakers
The speakers of Southern Pomo were never a unified political group; rather, they were spread across a number of villages and spoke slightly different dialects. Southern Pomo speakers did not have a name for their language or themselves. As the southernmost of the Pomo, the speakers of the language were the first to suffer the ravages of Spanish and, later, U.S. invasion. Southern Pomo speakers were used by the Spanish to construct the last of the California missions. The damage done during the Spanish colonial period was compounded by the United States control of California. Only the northernmost populations of Southern Pomo speakers, those of the Dry Creek and Cloverdale dialects, survived to be recorded by the time linguists began to collect data on the language.
At least four modern rancherias (the California term for small Indian reservations) include members whose ancestral language was Southern Pomo: Dry Creek, Cloverdale, Lytton and Graton. There is currently one known speaker, from Dry Creek, and a handful of partial speakers.
Read more about this topic: Southern Pomo Language
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“All the great speakers were bad speakers at first. Stumping it through England for seven years made Cobden a consummate debater. Stumping it through New England for twice seven trained Wendell Phillips.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language,’ that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar.’”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)