The Coosan (also Coos or Kusan) language family consists of two languages spoken along the southern

Oregon Oregon () is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of its eastern boundary with Idaho. T ...

coast. Both languages are now extinct.

Classification

* Hanis ''†'' * Miluk ''†'' ( Lower Coquille)

Melville Jacobs Melville Jacobs (July 3, 1902 – July 31, 1971) was an American anthropologist known for his extensive fieldwork on cultures of the Pacific Northwest. He was born in New York City. After studying with Franz Boas he became a member of the faculty ...

(1939) says that the languages are as close as

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and

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) ** Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...

. They share more than half of their vocabulary, though this is not always obvious, and grammatical differences cause the two languages to look quite different. The origin of the name ''Coos'' is uncertain: one idea is that it is derived from a Hanis stem ''gus-'' meaning 'south' as in ''gusimídži·č'' 'southward'; another idea is that it is derived from a southwestern Oregon Athabaskan word ''ku·s'' meaning 'bay'. Frachtenburg was the first major ethnolinguist to address the relatedness of these languages, saying that Hanis and Miluk were dialects of the same "Kusan" language.

also said that they were two dialects of the same languages; though he did note that Mrs. Annie Miner Peterson said they were in fact distinct languages and that Miluk had two dialects. In 1916

Edward Sapir Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American Jewish anthropologist-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. Sap ...

suggested that the Coosan languages are part of a larger Oregon Penutian genetic grouping. This analysis has been accepted by some. However, more recent work has placed Hanis and Miluk as both separate languages and part of their own language family, with Douglas-Tavani doing a comparative reconstruction of Proto-Coosan's phonemes and vocabulary

Phonology

Vowels

Diphthongs

Three Series of Stops

Consonants

Key

* Glottal Stops are represented by ʔ for subscript epsilon * Ejectives raised by an apostrophe (pʼ) can be substituted as exclamation points (p!) * Length and gemination are shown by a dot (m·) Mithun, Marianne. The Languages of Native North America. Edited by R. M. W. Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Cambridge University Press, 2001. * Campbell, Lyle. (1997). ''American Indian languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America''. New York: Oxford University Press. . * Frachtenberg, Leo J. (1914).
Lower Umpqua texts and notes on the Kusan dialects
'. Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology (Vol. 4, pp. 141–150). (Reprinted 1969, New York: AMS Press). *
Atlas of languages of intercultural communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas
* Mithun, Marianne. (1999). ''The Languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); . * Whereat, Don. (1992). (Personal communication in Mithun 1999). * Jacobs, Melville. (1940). Coos Narrative and Ethnologic Texts. University of Washington: Seattle. * DeLancey, S., & Golla, V. (1997). ‘The Penutian Hypothesis: Retrospect and Prospect’. International Journal of American Linguistics, 63(1), 171-202. * Douglas-Tavani, Jordan AG. (2021). 'Languages of the Bay: On the Proto-Coosan Hypothesis'. University of California: Santa Barbara. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/20f1966w

External links

Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw homepage
{{Authority control Coast Oregon Penutian languages Language families