New River Shasta language

New River Shasta
Native toUnited States
RegionSalmon River, northern California
EthnicityShasta
Extinctafter 1926
Hokan ?
  • Shasta–Palaihnihan
Language codes
ISO 639-3None (mis)
Glottolognewr1237
  New River Shasta
New River Shasta is classified as Extinct by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
[1]

New River Shasta is an extinct Shastan language formerly spoken in northern California. It may have had only 300 speakers before contact, and they soon went extinct; the language is attested in only a few short wordlists.[2] Kroeber regarded them as possibly "nearest to the major group in speech, although [...] their tongue as a whole must have been unintelligible to the Shasta proper." The last recorded speaker of New River Shasta was Saxy Kidd, who only remembered some words and had mostly forgotten his language.[3][4]

References

  1. ^ Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (Report) (3rd ed.). UNESCO. 2010. p. 11.
  2. ^ Kroeber (1925)
  3. ^ Merriam, C. Hart (April 1930). "THE NEW RIVER INDIANS TLÓ‐HŌTM‐TAH'‐HOI 1". American Anthropologist. 32 (2): 280–293. doi:10.1525/aa.1930.32.2.02a00030. ISSN 0002-7294.
  4. ^ Golla, Victor (2011). California Indian languages. University of California Press. pp. 90–91. ISBN 9780520266674. OCLC 767533019.

Sources

  • Mithun, Marianne (1999), The Languages of Native North America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press