Cayuse is an extinct

unclassified language An unclassified language is a language whose genetic affiliation to other languages has not been established. Languages can be unclassified for a variety of reasons, mostly due to a lack of reliable data but sometimes due to the confounding inf ...

once spoken by the

Cayuse people The Cayuse are a Native Americans in the United States, Native American tribe in what is now the state of Oregon in the United States. The Cayuse tribe shares a Umatilla Indian Reservation, reservation and government in northeastern Oregon with t ...

(autonym: ) of

Oregon Oregon ( , ) is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is a part of the Western U.S., with the Columbia River delineating much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while t ...

Classification

The first written vocabulary of the Cayuse language was published by Horatio Hale in 1846. As a member of the

United States Exploring Expedition The United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842 was an exploring and surveying expedition of the Pacific Ocean and surrounding lands conducted by the United States. The original appointed commanding officer was Commodore Thomas ap Catesby ...

, he had visited the

Pacific Northwest The Pacific Northwest (PNW; ) is a geographic region in Western North America bounded by its coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean to the west and, loosely, by the Rocky Mountains to the east. Though no official boundary exists, the most common ...

in 1841. Missionary Marcus Whitman was credited for providing "much valuable information" about the

and other natives nearby Waiilatpu. In his Waiilatpuan language family, Hale put Cayuse and the Molala language as the sole members. In 1910 or 1911, Stephens Savage, a Molala speaker, had told Leo Frachtenberg that the following five words were identical in both Cayuse and Molala: : In 1929

Edward Sapir Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American anthropologist-linguistics, linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States ...

grouped Cayuse with Molala as part of the ''Waiilatpuan'' branch of the

Plateau Penutian languages Plateau Penutian (also Shahapwailutan, Lepitan, Plateau) is a family of languages spoken in northern California, reaching through central-western Oregon to northern Washington (state), Washington and central-northern Idaho. The family is accept ...

. Bruce Rigsby reexamined the Cayuse-Molala lexical pairs provided by Hale in 1969 and found only a tenth to be potentially related terms. Whitman was credited as the origin of the Waiilatpuan linguistic family. The words presented by Savage were concluded by Rigsby to likely be loanwords. Upon his review of extant Molala and Cayuse linguistic data, Rigsby concluded "I do not see how the two languages could have possibly been mutually intelligible."

Pronouns

Cayuse pronouns listed by Hale: : Cayuse pronouns listed by McBean: :

Verbs

Cayuse verb paradigms documented by Henry W. Henshaw: ;'hungry' : ;'thirsty' :

Vocabulary

Limited lexical items in Cayuse have been collected by Rigsby, Melville Jacobs, Verne Ray, and Theodore Stern. Their Cayuse informants had highly limited knowledge of the language and were more fluent in either Sahaptin or

Nez Perce The Nez Perce (; autonym in Nez Perce language: , meaning 'we, the people') are an Indigenous people of the Plateau who still live on a fraction of the lands on the southeastern Columbia River Plateau in the Pacific Northwest. This region h ...

Hale

A word list of Cayuse with nearby 200 lexical items was documented by Hale. The word list has been reproduced below.

Nouns

Adjectives

Pronouns

Adverbs and others

Numerals

Verbs

References

Bibliography

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External links

Cayuse Indian Language (Waiilatpu)OLAC resources in and about the Cayuse language
{{Indigenous peoples in Washington Unclassified languages of North America Indigenous languages of the North American Plateau Indigenous languages of Oregon Extinct languages Languages extinct in the 1930s 1930s disestablishments in Oregon Cayuse