Washo/ˈwɒʃoʊ/[2] (or Washoe; endonym wá꞉šiw ʔítlu)[3] is an endangeredNative Americanlanguage isolate spoken by the Washo on the California–Nevada border in the drainages of the Truckee and Carson Rivers, especially around Lake Tahoe. While there were only 20 elderly native speakers of Washo as of 2011,[1] since 1994 there had been a small immersion school that has produced a number of moderately fluent younger speakers. The immersion school has since closed its doors and the language program now operates through the Cultural Resource Department for the Washoe Tribe. The language is still very much endangered; however, there has been a renaissance in the language revitalization movement as many of the students who attended the original immersion school have become teachers.
In 2012, Lakeview Commons Park in South Lake Tahoe was renamed in the Washo language. "The Washoe Tribe has presented the name Tahnu Leweh (pronounced approx. [tanulewe]) which, in native language, means "all the people's place." It is a name the Tribe would like to gift to El Dorado County and South Lake Tahoe as a symbol of peace, prosperity and goodness."[5]
Classification
Washo is usually considered a language isolate.[6] That is, it shares no demonstrated link with any other language, including its three direct neighboring languages, Northern Paiute (a Numic language of Uto-Aztecan), Maidu (Maiduan), and Sierra Miwok (Utian). It is sometimes classified as a Hokan language, but this language family is not universally accepted among specialists, nor is Washo's connection to it.[7]
The language was first described in A Grammar of the Washo Language by William H. Jacobsen, Jr., in a University of California, Berkeley, PhD dissertation and this remains the sole complete description of the language. There is no significant dialect variation. (Jacobsen's lifelong work with Washo is described at the University of Nevada Oral History Program.)[8]
Dialects
Washo shows very little geographic variation. Jacobsen (1986:108) wrote, "When there are two variants of a feature, generally one is found in a more northerly area and the other in a more southerly one, but the lines separating the two areas for the different features do not always coincide."
Phonology
Vowels
There are six distinct vowel qualities found in the Washo language, each of which occurs long and short. The sound quality of a vowel is dependent upon their length and the consonant they precede, as well as the stress put on the vowel.[9]
Vowels marked with the acute accent ( ´ ) are pronounced with stress, such as in the Washo ćigábut (summer).
In Washo, vowels can have either long or short length qualities; the longer quality is noted by appending a colon⟨꞉⟩ to the vowel, as in the above example míši milí꞉giyi. Vowels with such a mark are usually pronounced for twice the normal length. This can be seen in the difference between the words móko (shoes) mó꞉ko (knee). However, vowels pronounced this way may not always be followed by a colon.
Jacobsen described in detail various vowel alternations that distinguished the Washo speech communities.[11]
Consonants
Sequences not represented by a single letter in Washo almost always tend to occur in borrowed English words, such as the nd in kꞌindí (candy).[12][13]
Verbal inflection is rich with a large number of tenses. Tense is usually carried by a suffix that attaches to the verb. The tense suffix may signal recent past, intermediate past, the long-ago-but-remembered past, the distant past, the intermediate future, or the distant future. For example, the suffix -leg indicates that the verb describes an event that took place in the recent past, usually earlier the previous day as seen in the Washo sentence, dabóʔo lew búʔlegi ('the white man fed us').[citation needed]
Vowel Suffixes
Suffix Letter
Meaning
Used
Example
-ayʔ
intermediate past
earlier than the current day, but not the distant past
di hulúyay ('I fell over')
-gul
long ago, remembered past
within the lifetime of the speaker
gedí yeyemi ʔúšgulaygi ('They used to call him that')
-lul
distant past
before the lifetime of the speaker
ga móŋil halúliya ('They planted it here long ago')
ʔilćáćimiʔ etiʔi ('It's getting green.' It will be green)
-gab
distant future
the following day or later
milí꞉gi gabigi ('I will see you.' 'See you later')
Nouns
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (May 2008)
Possession in Washo is shown by prefixes added to the object. There are two sets of prefixes added: the first set if the object begins with a vowel and the second set if the object begins with a consonant.[citation needed]
^Lyle Campbell. American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America. (1997, Oxford, pg. 125). Marianne Mithun. The Languages of Native North America (1999, Cambridge, pg. 557)
^Jacobsen, William H. Jr. (December 1996). Tuohy, Donald R. (ed.). Beginning Washo(PDF). Nevada State Museum Occasional Papers. Vol. 5. Carson City, NV: Nevada State Museum. pp. 1–6.
^Jacobsen, William H. Jr. (1978). "Washo Internal Diversity and External Relations". In Tuohy, Donald R. (ed.). Selected Papers from the 14th Great Basin Anthropological Conference. Ballena Press Publications in Archaeology, Ethnology and History. Vol. 11. Socorro, NM. pp. 115–147.
^Caitlin Keliiaa. 2012. "Washiw Wagayay Maŋal: Reweaving the Washoe Language," University of California, Los Angeles MA thesis.
Sources
Bright, William O. (2007). "North American Indian Languages". Encyclopædia Britannica. pp. 762–767.
Campbell, Lyle (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19-509427-1.
d'Azevedo, Warren L. (1986). "Washoe". In d'Azevedo, Warren L. (ed.). Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 11: Great Basin. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. pp. 466–498. ISBN0-16-004578-9.
Goddard, Ives, ed. (1996). Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 17: Languages. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN0-16-048774-9.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (1987). Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Jacobsen, William Jr. (1964). A Grammar of the Washo Language. Berkeley: University of California Press. Retrieved September 27, 2016.
Jacobsen, William H. (1986). "Washoe Language". In d'Azevedo, Warren L. (ed.). Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 11: Great Basin. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. pp. 107–112. ISBN0-16-004578-9.
Jacobsen, William H. (1996). Beginning Washo. Occasional Papers. Vol. 5. Nevada State Museum.
Kaufman, Terrence (1988). "A Research Program for Reconstructing Proto-Hokan: First Gropings". In DeLancey, Scott (ed.). Papers from the 1988 Hokan–Penutian Languages Workshop. Publications of the Center for Amerindian Linguistics and Ethnography. Vol. 1. Eugene, Oregon: Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon. pp. 50–168.
"The Washo Project". The University of Chicago. 2008. Retrieved May 4, 2011.
Yu, Alan C. L. (2006). "Quantity, stress and reduplication in Washo". Phonology. 22 (3): 437. doi:10.1017/S0952675705000679.
Further reading
Dangberg, Grace (1927). Kroeber, A. L.; Lowie, Robert H. (eds.). "Washo texts"(PDF). University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology. 22 (3): 391–443.
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