The Pomoan, or Pomo , languages are a small family of seven languages indigenous to northern

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

spoken by the

Pomo people The Pomo are a Indigenous peoples of California, Native American people of California. Historical Pomo territory in Northern California was large, bordered by the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast to the west, extending inland to ...

, whose ancestors lived in the valley of the Russian River and the Clear Lake basin. Four languages are extinct, and all surviving languages except Kashaya have fewer than ten speakers.

Geographical distribution

John Wesley Powell, who was the first to define the extent of the family, noted that its boundaries were the Pacific Ocean to the west, Wintuan territory in the Sacramento Valley to the east, the head of the Russian River to the north, and Bodega Head and present-day Santa Rosa to the south (Powell 1891:87-88). Only Northeastern Pomo was not contiguous with the other Pomoan languages, being separated by an intervening region of Wintuan speakers.

Internal relationships of languages

Pomoan is a family of seven languages. Their relationship to one another was first formally recognized by John Wesley Powell, who proposed that they be called the "Kulanapan Family" (Powell 1891). Like many of Powell's obscure nomenclatural proposals, particularly for California languages, "Kulanapan" was ignored. In its place,

Pomo The Pomo are a Indigenous peoples of California, Native American people of California. Historical Pomo territory in Northern California was large, bordered by the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast to the west, extending inland to ...

, the term used by Indians and Whites alike for Northern Pomo, was arbitrarily extended to include the rest of the family. All seven languages were first systematically identified as Pomo by Samuel Barrett (1908). To avoid complications, Barrett named each of the Pomoan languages according to its geographic position ("Northern Pomo," "Southeastern Pomo," etc.) This naming convention quickly gained wide acceptance and is still in general use, except for the substitution of "Kashaya" for Barrett's "Southwestern Pomo". Barrett's geographical language names often lead those unfamiliar with the Pomoan languages to the misconception that they are dialects of a single "Pomo" language. Various genetic subgroupings of the family have been proposed, although the general outlines have remained fairly consistent. The current consensus view (cf. Mithun 1999) favors the tree presented in Oswalt (1964), shown below. * Pomoan ** Southeastern Pomo **

Eastern Pomo Eastern Pomo, also known as Clear Lake Pomo, is a nearly extinct Pomoan language spoken around Clear Lake in Lake County, California by one of the Pomo peoples. It is not mutually intelligible with the other Pomoan languages. Before contact ...

† ** Northeastern Pomo † ** Western *** Northern Pomo † *** Southern **** Central Pomo † **** Southern Pomo † **** Kashaya (Southwestern Pomo) Pomoan family tree

Essentially identical versions of this classifications are presented in Oswalt and McLendon's "Introduction" to the Pomo chapters in Heizer, ed. (1978) and in Campbell (1997). The most important dissenter was Abraham M. Halpern, one of the few linguists since Barrett's time to collect comparative data on all of the Pomoan languages. Halpern's classification differed from Oswalt's mainly in the placement of Northeastern Pomo. Instead of considering it an independent branch of the family, Halpern grouped it with the languages of Oswalt's "Western" branch. He suggested the possibility that Northeastern Pomo represents a recent migration of a Northern Pomo subgroup (Halpern 1964; Golla 2011:106-7).

Proto-language

Proto-Pomo reconstructions by McLendon (1973):McLendon, Sally. 1973. ''Proto Pomo''. (University of California publications in linguistics, 71.) Berkeley: University of California Press. :

Notes

References

* Barrett, Samuel A. (1908). ''The Ethno-Geography of the Pomo and Neighboring Indians''. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, 6

* Campbell, Lyle. (1997). ''American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America''. New York: Oxford University Press. . * Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996). ''Languages''. Handbook of North American Indians (W. C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. . * Golla, Victor. (2011). ''California Indian Languages.'' Berkeley: University of California Press. . * McLendon, Sally & Robert L. Oswalt (1978). "Pomo: Introduction". In ''California'', ed. Robert F. Heizer. Vol. 8 of ''Handbook of North American Indians'', ed. William C. Sturtevant, pp. 274–88. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. . * Mithun, Marianne. (1999). ''The languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); . * Powell, John Wesley. (1891). ''Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico''. Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 7:1-142. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office

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