Awaswas, or Santa Cruz, is one of eight

Ohlone languages The Ohlone languages, also known as Costanoan, are a small family of indigenous languages spoken by the Ohlone people. The pre-contact distribution of these languages ranged from the southern San Francisco Bay Area to northern Monterey County. ...

. It was historically spoken by the Awaswas people, an

indigenous people of California The indigenous peoples of California (known as Native Californians) are the indigenous inhabitants who have lived or currently live in the geographic area within the current boundaries of California before and after the arrival of Europeans. ...

. Linguists originally called the language Santa Cruz after the mission in the area but it was renamed to Awaswas as part of a move in the late 1960s and early 1970s by graduate students at the University of California Berkeley to use native names for the Ohlone languages. Utian_langs_(cropped)

History

The Awaswas lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains and along the coast of present-day Santa Cruz County from present-day Davenport to Aptos. Awaswas became the main language spoken at the

Mission Santa Cruz Mission Santa Cruz (''La Misión de la Exaltación de la Santa Cruz'', which translates as the Mission of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross), was the twelfth of twenty-one Spanish missions in California (today's U.S. state), established by the Fr ...

. However, there is evidence that this grouping was more geographic than linguistic, and that the records of the "Santa Cruz Costanoan" language in fact represent several diverse dialects. A report from 1952 identified four different distinct forms of Costanoan and a more recent report from 2009 states, "No area in North America was more crowded with distinct languages and language families than central California at the time of Spanish contact." The Ohlone language group is broken into branches with the most related languages grouped together. Awaswas has been grouped in both the northern and southern branches with different research disagreeing on the best fitting classification. Some branches within the Ohlone language group have been described as being as similar to each other as different local dialects of Italian, while others, such as Rumsen, Mutsun, and Awaswas "were as closely related as French, Spanish, and Portuguese." In 2012, Tribal Chairman Valentin Lopez stated that "his great-great-grandmother was the last of the Awaswas speakers."

Notes

References

* Kroeber, Alfred L. 1925. ''Handbook of the Indians of California''. Washington, D.C: ''Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin'' No. 78. (map of villages, page 465) * Milliken, Randall. ''A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area 1769-1910'' Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press Publication, 1995. (alk. paper) * Teixeira, Lauren. ''The Costanoan/Ohlone Indians of the San Francisco and Monterey Bay Area, A Research Guide''. Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press Publication, 1997. . * Yamane, Linda, ed. 2002. ''A Gathering of Voices: The Native Peoples of the Central California Coast''. Santa Cruz County History Journal, Number 5. Santa Cruz, CA: Museum of Art & History.

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Awaswas Language Ohlone languages Extinct languages of North America Santa Cruz, California

History

See also

Notes

References

External links