Revision as of 18:25, 13 August 2009 by Rosbot(talk | contribs)(New page: <table valign=top> <tr> <td valign=top align=left width="50%"> <table valign=top> <tr><td><b>Description:</b> Karkin (also called Los Carquines in Spanish) is a name o...)
Karkin (also called Los Carquines in Spanish) is a name of one sub-group of the indigenous Ohlone people of California, as well as the name of the language they spoke.
Karkin (Los Carquines) is a language within the Ohlone/Costanoan sub-family of the Utian language language family. It was spoken in Northern California by one local tribal group of the Ohlone who lived in the Carquinez Strait region in the northeast portion of the San Francisco Bay estuary. Its only documentation is a single vocabulary obtained by linguist-missionary Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta at Mission Dolores in 1821. Although meager, the records of Karkin show that it constituted a distinct branch of Costanoan, strikingly different from the neighboring Chochenyo Ohlone language and other Ohlone languages spoken farther south. Karkin has probably not been spoken since the nineteenth century.