Wintuan Languages - Family Division

Family Division

Shipley (1978:89) listed three Wintuan languages in his encyclopedic overview of California Indian languages. More recently Mithun (1999) split Southern Wintuan into a Patwin language and a Southern Patwin language, resulting in the following classification.

I. Northern Wintuan

1. Wintu (AKA Wintu proper)

2. Nomlaki (AKA Noamlakee, Central Wintu)

II. Southern Wintuan

3. Patwin (AKA Patween)

4. Southern Patwin (†)

Wintu may only have 2 speakers left. Nomlaki has few to none speakers. One speaker of Patwin (Hill Patwin dialect) remained in 1997. Southern Patwin, once spoken by the Suisun local tribe just northeast of San Francisco Bay, became extinct fairly soon after contact with whites and is thus poorly known (Mithun 1999). Gordon (2005) reports 5-6 speakers total for all Wintuan languages. Wintu proper is the best documented of the four Wintuan languages.

Pitkin (1984) considers the Wintuan languages as close to each other as the Romance languages. They may have diverged from a common tongue only 2,000 years ago.

The Wintuan family is a sometime member of the hypothetical Penutian language phylum or stock. It was one of five member families of the original California kernel of Penutian, proposed by Roland B. Dixon and Alfred L. Kroeber (1913a, 1913b). However, it is now established that Wintuan is a relatively recent arrival to California—with northern and southern Wintuan perhaps arriving separately, and that traditional California Penutian (in any case a historical artifact of when the languages were studies) cannot be valid. Wintuan languages share vocabulary with Klamath and Alsea which appear to be loans (Delancey and Golla 1997; Liedtke 2007; Golla 2007:75-78).