The Ohlone, formerly known as Costanoans (from Spanish costeño meaning 'coast dweller'), are a Native American people of the Northern California coast. When Spanish explorers and missionaries arrived in the late 18th century, the Ohlone inhabited the area along the coast from San Francisco Bay through Monterey Bay to the lower Salinas Valley.At that time they spoke a …

Na-Dene (/ ˌ n ɑː d ɪ ˈ n eɪ /; also Nadene, Na-Dené, Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit, Tlina–Dene) is a family of Native American languages that includes at least the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit languages. Haida was formerly included, but is now considered doubtful. By far the most widely spoken Na-Dene language today is Navajo.. In February 2008, a proposal connecting …

Uto-Aztecan, Uto-Aztekan / ˈ juː t oʊ. æ z ˈ t ɛ k ən / or (rarely in English) Uto-Nahuatl is a family of indigenous languages of the Americas, consisting of over thirty languages.Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico.The name of the language family was created to show that it includes both the Ute language of Utah and the …

The Algonquian languages (/ æ l ˈ ɡ ɒ ŋ k i ə n / or / æ l ˈ ɡ ɒ ŋ k w i ə n /; also Algonkian) are a subfamily of indigenous American languages that include most languages in the Algic language family.The name of the Algonquian language family is distinguished from the orthographically similar Algonquin dialect of the Indigenous Ojibwe language (Chippewa), which is a senior …

Classification. Five clear Pakawan languages are attested: Coahuilteco, Cotoname, Comecrudo, Garza and Mamulique.The first three were first proposed to be related by John Wesley Powell in 1891, in a grouping then called Coahuiltecan. Goddard (1979) groups the latter three in a Comecrudan family while considering the others language isolates.The current composition …

The Iroquoian languages are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America.They are known for their general lack of labial consonants.The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking.. As of 2020, all surviving Iroquoian languages are severely or critically endangered, with only a few elderly speakers remaining.The two languages with the most …

In Siouanist literature (e.g., Rankin et al. 2015), Americanist phonetic transcriptions are the norm, so IPA * ʃ is Americanist *š, IPA *j is Americanist *y, and so on. The major change to the previously-proposed system was accomplished by systematically accounting for the distribution of multiple stop series in modern Siouan languages by tracing them back to multiple stop series …

An extinct language may be narrowly defined as a language with no native speakers and no descendant languages.Under this definition, a language becomes extinct upon the death of its last native speaker, the terminal speaker.A language like Latin is not extinct in this sense, because it evolved into the modern Romance languages; it is impossible to state when Latin …

Chumashan was a family of languages that were spoken on the southern California coast by Native American Chumash people, from the Coastal plains and valleys of San Luis Obispo to Malibu, neighboring inland and Transverse Ranges valleys and canyons east to bordering the San Joaquin Valley, to three adjacent Channel Islands: San Miguel, Santa Rosa, and Santa Cruz.

The indigenous peoples of California (known as Native Californians) are the indigenous inhabitants who have lived or currently live in the geographic area within the current boundaries of California before and after the arrival of Europeans. With over forty groups seeking to be federally recognized tribes, California has the second-largest Native American population in the United …