Salinan was the indigenous language of the

Salinan people The Salinan are a Native American tribe whose ancestral territory is in the southern Salinas Valley and the Santa Lucia Range in the Central Coast of California. Today, the Salinan governments are now working toward federal tribal recognition f ...

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 ...

. 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. Sa ...

included it in a subfamily of Hokan, along with Chumash 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 language
overview at the

Survey of California and Other Indian Languages The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (originally the Survey of California Indian Languages) at the University of California at Berkeley documents, catalogs, and archives the indigenous languages of the Americas. The survey also hosts ...

''Antoniaño Salinan'' field recordings
collected 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