Kashaya language
| Kashaya | |
|---|---|
| Kʼahšá:ya | |
| Native to | United States |
| Region | Sonoma County, California |
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Native speakers
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45 (1994) |
|
Pomoan
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | kash1280 |
The seven Pomoan languages with an indication of their pre-contact distribution within California
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Kashaya (also Southwestern Pomo, Kashia) is a name for a branch of Pomo people whose historical home is the Pacific Coastline of what is now Sonoma County, California, and also their severely endangered Pomoan language. The Pomoan languages have been classified as part of the Hokan language family (although the status of Hokan itself is controversial). The name Kashaya corresponds to words in neighboring languages with meanings such as "skillful" and "expert gambler". It is spoken by the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of the Stewarts Point Rancheria.
Kashaya has five vowels, which all occur as short and long. In the orthography established by Robert Oswalt, long vowels are represented by a raised dot (·).
Vowel length is contrastive in pairs such as ʔihya "bone" versus ʔihya: "wind", and dono "hill, mountain" versus dono: "uphill".
Kashaya has the consonants shown in the chart below, following the transcription style established by Oswalt (1961). The letter c represents the affricate /t͡ʃ/, which patterns phonologically as a palatal stop. The coronal stops differ not so much in the location of the contact against the top of the mouth as in the configuration of the tongue. The dental stop t is described by Oswalt (1961) as post-dental among older speakers but as interdental among younger speakers more heavily influenced by English, similar to the place of articulation of /θ/. This dental stop has a laminal articulation perhaps best transcribed in IPA as /t̻/. The alveolar stop ṭ is an apical articulation, more precisely /t̺/. For younger speakers it resembles the English t in position. This chart treats aspirated and glottalized sonorants as single segments; Oswalt analyzes them as sequences of a sonorant plus /h/ or /ʔ/, from which they often derive.
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