Upper Umpqua language

(Upper) Umpqua
Native to USA
Region Oregon (Umpqua Valley)
Extinct ca. 1950
Language codes
ISO 639-3 xup
Linguist list
xup
  qhk (not ISO)
Glottolog uppe1436[1]

Upper Umpqua is an extinct Athabaskan language formerly spoken along the south fork of the Umpqua River in west-central Oregon by Upper Umpqua (Etnemitane) people in the vicinity of modern Roseburg. It has been extinct for at least fifty years and little is known about it other than it belongs to the same Oregon Athabaskan cluster of Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages as the Lower Rogue River language, Upper Rogue River language and Chetco-Tolowa.

The most important documentation of Upper Umpqua is the extensive vocabulary obtained by Horatio Hale in 1841 (published in Hale 1846). Melville Jacobs and John P. Harrington were able to collect fragmentary data from the last speakers as late as the 1940s (Golla 2011:70-72). Although known to early explorers and settlers as Umpqua, the language is now usually called Upper Umpqua to distinguish it from the unrelated Oregon Coast Penutian language Lower Umpqua (Kuitsh or Siuslaw) that was spoken closer to the coast in the same area.

References

  1. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Upper Umpqua". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 8/12/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.