Wiyot language
| Wiyot | |
|---|---|
| Region | California, U.S. |
| Ethnicity | Wiyot people |
| Extinct | 1962, with the death of Delia Prince |
|
Algic
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | wiyo1248 |
Wiyot (also Wishosk) is an extinct Algic language, formerly spoken by the Wiyot people of Humboldt Bay, California. The language's last native speaker, Della Prince, died in 1962.
Wiyot, along with its geographical neighbor Yurok, were first identified as relatives of the Algonquin languages by Edward Sapir in 1913, though this classification was disputed for decades in what came to be known as the "Ritwan controversy". Due to the enormous geographical separation of Wiyot and Yurok from all other Algonquin languages, the validity of their genetic link was hotly contested by leading Americanist linguists; as Ives Goddard put it, the issue "has profound implications for the prehistory of North America". However, by the 1950s, the genetic relationship between the Algonquin languages and Wiyot and Yurok had been established to the satisfaction of most, if not all, researchers, giving rise to the term "Algic" to refer to the Algonquin languages together with Wiyot and Yurok.
Some Wiyots are attempting a revival of the language.
Karl V. Teeter published the first descriptive grammar of Wiyot in 1964. His data, supplied by Della Prince soon before her death, was crucial to the establishment of the genetic relationship between Algonquin and Wiyot, and effectively ended the scholarly conflict surrounding the issue. All of the linguistic data below comes from his work, published by the University of California Press.
The consonants of Wiyot, as recorded by Teeter, are given in this chart, with a Practical Orthography in boldface and the IPA equivalents in brackets.
Wiyot syllables always begin with consonants or consonant clusters, which are followed by a vowel. This vowel may be long or short. If the vowel is short, the syllable must end in the same consonant that begins the next syllable. Therefore, all non-final syllables are heavy, acquiring either a CVV or CVC structure. Word final syllables may or may not be heavy.
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