Maiduan languages

Maiduan (also Maidun, Pujunan) is a small endangered language family of northeastern California.

Maiduan
Maidun, Pujunan
EthnicityMaidu, Konkow, Nisenan
Geographic
distribution
California
Linguistic classificationPenutian ?
  • Maiduan
Glottologmaid1262[1]
Pre-contact distribution of Maiduan languages
Pre-contact distribution of Maiduan languages (California detail map)

Family division

The Maiduan consists of 4 languages:

  1. Maidu (also known as Maidu proper, Northeastern Maidu, Mountain Maidu)
  2. Chico (also known as Valley Maidu)
  3. Konkow (also known as Northwestern Maidu)
  4. Nisenan (also known as Southern Maidu)

The languages have similar sound systems but differ significantly in terms of grammar. They are not mutually intelligible, even though many works often refer to all of the speakers of these languages as Maidu. The Chico dialects are little known due to scanty documentation, so their precise genetic relationship to the other languages probably cannot be determined (Mithun 1999), and in any case may have been not a fourth Maiduan language, but widely divergent dialects of Konkow (Ultan 1967).

Three of the languages went extinct by approximately the year 2000. Konkow was reported to have 3 elderly speakers in 2007.[2]

Genetic relations

Maiduan is often considered in various Penutian phylum proposals. It was one of the original members of California Penutian (the Penutian "core").

gollark: Nobody will stop you because you have an orbital doomsday device.
gollark: "Excuse me, but you're not permitted to have that orbital doomsday device here, we'd like to request that you turn over control of the orbital doomsday device to a UN committee."
gollark: The Outer Space Treaty? Nobody will care about that as soon as there is *some* commercial or military or whatever gain.
gollark: They could also just launch satellites carrying metal things and mass drivers or whatever.
gollark: Or nuclear fission, which is cooler and energy-denser.

See also

References

  1. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Maiduan". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  2. Renaissance, Maidu (21 August 2007). "Konkow We'wejbo'sis Project 2007- 2011: Concow Language, Annette De Brotherton". Retrieved 3 June 2018.

Bibliography

  • Callaghan, Catherine A. (1997). "Evidence for Yok-Utian", International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 18–64.
  • Heizer, Robert F. (1966). Languages, territories, and names of California Indian tribes.
  • Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
  • Shipley, William. (1961). "Maidu and Nisenan: A Binary Survey", International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Jan., 1961), pp. 46–51.
  • Ultan, Russell. (1964). "Proto-Maiduan phonology," International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 30, pp. 355-370.
  • Ultan, Russell. (1967). "Konkow Grammar," unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California at Berkeley
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.