The Rumsen language (also known as Rumsien, ''San Carlos Costanoan'' and ''Carmeleno'') 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. ...

, historically spoken by the Rumsen people of Northern California. The Rumsen language was spoken from the

Pajaro River The Pajaro River (''pájaro'' is ''bird'' in Spanish) is a U.S. river in the Central Coast region of California, forming part of the border between San Benito and Santa Clara Counties, the entire border between San Benito and Santa Cruz Cou ...

Point Sur Point Sur State Historic Park is a California State Park on the Big Sur coastline of Monterey County, California, United States, south of Rio Road in Carmel. The 1889 Point Sur Lighthouse is on the National Register of Historic Places. Hist ...

, and on the lower courses of the Pajaro, as well as on the Salinas and Carmel Rivers, and the region of the present-day cities of Salinas,

Monterey Monterey (; es, Monterrey; Ohlone: ) is a city located in Monterey County on the southern edge of Monterey Bay on the U.S. state of California's Central Coast. Founded on June 3, 1770, it functioned as the capital of Alta California under bot ...

and Carmel.

History

One of eight languages within the Ohlone branch of the Utian family, it became one of two important native languages spoken at the Mission San Carlos Borroméo de Carmelo founded in 1770, the other being the

Esselen language Esselen was the language of the Esselen (or self-designated ''Huelel'') Nation, which aboriginally occupied the mountainous Central Coast of California, immediately south of Monterey (Shaul 1995). It was probably a language isolate, though has be ...

. The last fluent speaker of Rumsen was Isabel Meadows,Hinton 2001:430
/ref> who died in 1939. The Bureau of American Ethnology linguist

John Peabody Harrington John Peabody Harrington (April 29, 1884 – October 21, 1961) was an American linguist and ethnologist and a specialist in the indigenous peoples of California. Harrington is noted for the massive volume of his documentary output, most of which h ...

conducted very extensive fieldwork with Meadows in the last several years of her life. These notes, still mostly unpublished, now constitute the foundation for current linguistic research and revitalization efforts on the Rumsen language. The Costanoan Rumsen Carmel Tribe has been in the process of reestablishing their language. They have begun efforts to teach their tribal members Rumsen and are working to complete a revised English - Rumsen Dictionary. The Rumsen website can be found at www.costanoanrumsen.org.

Rumsen-speaking tribes

Dialects of the Rumsen language were spoken by four independent local tribes, including the ''Rumsen'' themselves, the ''Ensen'' of the Salinas vicinity, the ''Calendaruc'' of the central shoreline of Monterey Bay, and the ''Sargentaruc'' of the Big Sur Coast. The territory of the language group was bordered by Monterey Bay and the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the contin ...

to the west, the Awaswas Ohlone to the north, the Mutsun Ohlone to the east, the Chalon Ohlone on the south east, and the Esselen to the south.Milliken, Randall. 1987. ''Ethnohistory of the Rumsen''. Papers in Northern California Anthropology No. 2. Salinas, CA: Coyote Press.

Phonology

Notes

References

* Breschini, Gary S. and Trudy Haversat. 1994. Rumsen Seasonality and Population Dynamics. In ''The Ohlone Past and Present'', pp. 183–197, Lowell J. Bean, editor. Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press. * Hackel, Steven W. 2005. ''Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850''. University of North Carolina Press. * Hinton, Leanne. 2001. ''The Ohlone Languages'', in
The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice
', pp. 425–432. Emerald Group Publishing . * 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) * Levy, Richard. 1978. ''Costanoan'', in ''Handbook of North American Indians'', Vol. 8 (California). William C. Sturtevant, and Robert F. Heizer, eds. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978. / 0160045754, pages 485–495. * Milliken, Randall. 1987. ''Ethnohistory of the Rumsen''. Papers in Northern California Anthropology No. 2. Salinas, CA: Coyote Press. * Teixeira, Lauren. ''The Costanoan/Ohlone Indians of the San Francisco and Monterey Bay Area, A Research Guide''. Menlo Park, CA: Ballena Press Publication, 1997. .

External links