| North American language families |   |
This map was compiled by a noted Americanist, Ives Goddard. It represents a fairly conservative evaluation of what language relationships we can be confident of, and reflects a consensus of most scholars.
This map was compiled by a noted Americanist, Ives Goddard. It represents a fairly conservative evaluation of what language relationships we can be confident of, and reflects a consensus of most scholars. |
The Pomoan family of seven languages, spoken close together in Northern California (in blue with a checked pattern), is quite clearly a linguistic grouping. They are mainly named for cardinal directions (Southern, Northeastern) except for Kashaya, which is however also called Southwestern in older literature. This map simultaneously presents more conservative and more liberal groupings of languages, at least in the case of Penutian and Hokan: these controversial proposals have the same general color, but the well accepted subparts are identified by distinct patterns. Thus there is no controversy about Maiduan as a grouping, but whether it is related to Miwokan is not at all certain. For the other families, such as Athabaskan, the different patterns show branches of an uncontroversial family. |
You can see by comparing a few vocabulary items that the Pomoan languages resemble one another quite strongly. (Central and especially Southern are closely related to Kashaya, in a "Southern Group".) These cognates are related words in different languages, which are hypothesized to derive from a single ancestral word, as spoken in the language we can call Proto-Pomo.
These forms are taken mainly from McLendon (1973), with the items in italics (which are less reliable) from Webb (1971). The forms in Proto-Pomo are generally fairly similar to Southern Pomo and Kashaya, which preserve a lot of the old distinctions that have been lost in other languages of the family. A hyphen means the word is a bound form and may need to occur with another element to complete the basic meaning; for example, Southern Pomo "stream" is biʔda-kʰa, where kʰa is "water"; and the Eastern Pomo element can be identified in bi·dá-mi "stream" and bi·dá-w "downstream". |
The yellow-green color marks the Yuman family, or more fully Cochimí-Yuman to include languages further south in Baja California (here labeled Borjeño, etc.). |
Like Pomoan, the Yuman family is well established. You can get a sense of this from these quite similar words in the various languages.
The first three languages are called "Northern Yuman", and form a tight grouping, as you can see from the similarities in the forms of these words. |
The green areas are the languages classified as Hokan; this includes Pomo(an), clearly labeled, as well as the Yuman languages, which are the Hokan grouping in the south – in Arizona and Southern California (and into Mexico, not shown). The heavy gray lines delimit cultural areas and are not linguistic boundaries.
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Although, like other stocks, Hokan is just a hypothesis, Langdon (1979) argued for a relatively clear connection between Pomoan and the Yuman languages, based on various morphological similarities as well as possible cognate roots. Some examples are shown here, simplifying a few details. Some of the Yuman reconstructions have morpheme breaks, indicated with a hyphen.
You can see consonant correspondences such asš:ṣ, b:p, m:m. The vowels correspond fairly well also. Note also that the words for "long" given above (kúl etc.) resemble Pomoan *ʔahqól of the same meaning. Campbell (2000), who takes relatively conservative positions on language grouping, finds the evidence promising but not yet persuasive. |
Attempts to link Pomoan and Yuman to a wider set of languages are considerably more tentative. Here are some proposed cognate sets, just from the languages spoken in California (from Zhivlov 2013, based partly on Kaufman 1988; the proto-forms are not always the same as cited above for Pomoan and Yuman). Wider proposals link Hokan to isolated languages in Texas and nearby, as well as the Mayan family of Central America.
It should be clear that these resemblances are far more scattered, and do not seem to have good evidence for persuasive regular correspondences. The problem is that these similarities could be due to chance. |
The large Algonquian language family is spoken over a wide region of the US and Canada. Two languages of the northern California coast, called Yurok and Wiyot, together with Algonquian form the Algic family. The two California languages are sometimes called Ritwan, based on an earlier claim that they constitute a separate branch of the family; but, remarkably given the geographical distribution, there is not currently agreement that they are more closely related to each other than to the rest of the family. |
Eastern Algonquian is the largest branch of the Algonquian family; the other languages are generally not considered to be groupable into larger branches, other than Ojibwa and Potawatomi. Very closely related languages such as Arapaho and Atsina are listed as single entities here. |
Here are some examples of cognate words across the family, along with standard reconstructions.
Unami (native term, Lenape) is the southern variety of Delaware, in the Eastern Algonquian subgrouping. Although Arapaho is clearly more aberrant, some systematic correspondences can be seen with the other languages, including m:b and p:č (which we will examine in more detail below). This family is close enough that lexical sets like these make their relatedness quite obvious. There are also deep similarities among the languages in their morphological structure. |
The Algonquian languages build verb stems out of three elements, called roots, medials, and finals. The same structures can be found in the California languages.
Such patterns could of course arise independently, but are consistent with a deep relationship. They also help to isolate the parallel elements (such as medials) that should be compared across the family. |
Although lexical items are relatively easy to replace over time, morphological elements such as person-number inflection are less commonly replaced. And here we find striking similarities across Algic, which in effect means comparing the Ritwan languages to the reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian. These are the prefixes for marking possession on a noun.
Only "Set II" is shown for Wiyot; "Set I" is similar but includes the vowel /u/. Notably, within Wiyot, the voiced stops /d, b/ alternate with /n, m/ in certain contexts, suggesting these prefixes were originally nasals as inherited from Proto-Algic. |
It is harder to find good lexical cognate sets for Algic. But here are a few that have been proposed.
A few complications:
This is the kind of evidence that traditional historical linguists require to establish a common origin. |
A dramatic example of a language that looks superficially unrelated but in fact is clearly part of a family is Arapaho in Algonquian.
An online dictionary, with some audio recordings, is available here: |
Compare these Cree words (Central Algonquian) with the very different ones in Arapaho. At first glance, they seem too different to be related.
When examined more closely, however, and in the context of the entire Algonquian family, these words can be shown to demonstrate systematic patterns. You should be able to see several of them even in this short list – look at /p/ in Cree and its correspondents in Arapaho, for example. |
Your homework this week will involve applying these rules to Proto-Algonquian forms, to yield the Arapaho modern form. See the handout on Canvas for an exercise.
Vowels can be short or long unless otherwise specified by a breve [
̆] |
A "stock" (or "phylum") is a collection of language families claimed
to be a single super-family of related languages. The evidence
for these is typically rather weak, but the 
