Salinan was the indigenous language of the
Salinan people of the central coast of
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
. It has been extinct since the death of the last speaker in 1958.
The language is attested to some extent in colonial sources such as Sitjar (1860), but the principal published documentation is
Mason (1918). The main modern grammatical study, based on Mason's data and on the field notes of
John Peabody Harrington and
William H. Jacobsen, is Turner (1987), which also contains a complete bibliography of the primary sources and discussion of their orthography.
Two dialects are recognized, ''Antoniaño'' and ''Migueleño'', associated with the missions of San Antonio and San Miguel, respectively. Antoniaño is "sometimes also termed Sextapay, associated with
the area of the Franciscan
Mission of San Antonio de Padua in Monterey County." There may have been a third, ''Playano'' dialect, as suggested by mention of such a subdivision of the people, but nothing is known of them linguistically.
Salinan may be a part of the
Hokan family.
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 ...
included it in a subfamily of Hokan, along with
Chumash Chumash may refer to:
*Chumash (Judaism), a Hebrew word for the Pentateuch, used in Judaism
*Chumash people, a Native American people of southern California
*Chumashan languages, indigenous languages of California
See also
*Chumash traditional n ...
and
Seri. This hypothetical classification (which has had many skeptics) found its way into several encyclopedias and presentations of language families before much supporting evidence for this subfamily had been presented, but is currently fairly well established.
Phonology
The charts of consonants and vowels in the Salinan language:
Consonants
Voiced plosives /b d ɡ/ likely came as a result of Spanish influence.
Vowels
Mid vowels occurred likely due to Spanish influence.
Vocabulary
Salinan plant and animal names from Mason (1918):
[University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 14.1-154. ]
Animals
:
Plants
:
Bibliography
*
*University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 14.1-154.
*
Sitjar, Fr. Buenaventura (1861) ''Vocabulario de la lengua de los naturales de la mission de San Antonio, Alta California.'' Shea's Library of American Linguistics, 7. Reprinted 1970 at New York by AMS Press.
*
References
External links
Salinan languageoverview at the
Survey of California and Other Indian Languages''Antoniaño Salinan'' field recordingscollected by William H. Jacobsen, Jr. spoken by Elario Quintana and Dave Mora
*
OLAC resources in and about the Salinan language
{{DEFAULTSORT:Salinan Language
Hokan languages
Indigenous languages of California
Salinan people
Extinct languages of North America
Language isolates of North America
Languages extinct in the 1950s
hr:Salinan