| Also Known As: Kashaya Language,Southwestern Pomo
Description:
Kashaya (also Southwestern Pomo, Kashia) is a name for a branch of the half dozen Pomo people who resided on the Pacific Coastline of Sonoma County, California, and also their severely endangered Pomoan language spoken here. The Pomoan languages have been classified as Hokan, but this proposal is controversial. The name Kashaya corresponds to words in neighboring languages with meanings such as "skillful" and "expert gambler". It is spoken by the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of the Stewarts Point Rancheria.
Kashaya has five vowels, which all occur as short and long.
Vowel length is contrastive in pairs such as ʔihya "bone" versus ʔihya: "wind", and dono "hill, mountain" versus dono: "uphill".
Kashaya has the consonants shown in the chart below, following the transcription style established by Oswalt (1961). The letter c represents the affricate /t͡ʃ/, which patterns phonologically as a palatal stop. The coronal stops differ not so much in the location of the contact against the top of the mouth as in the configuration of the tongue. The dental stop t is described by Oswalt (1961) as post-dental among older speakers but as interdental among younger speakers more heavily influenced by..... full article at Wikipedia |
