William F. Shipley listed three Wintuan languages in his encyclopedic overview of California Indian languages.[1] More recently, Marianne Mithun split Southern Wintuan into a Patwin language and a Southern Patwin language, resulting in the following classification.[2]
Wintu became extinct with the death of the last fluent speaker in 2003.[3] As of 2010[update], Nomlaki has at least one partial speaker.[3] One speaker of Patwin (Hill Patwin dialect) remained in 2003.[4] Southern Patwin, once spoken by the Suisun local tribe just northeast of San Francisco Bay, became extinct in the early 20th century and is thus poorly known.[5][2] Wintu proper is the best documented of the four Wintuan languages.
Pitkin estimated that the Wintuan languages were about as close to each other as the Romance languages.[6] They may have diverged from a common tongue only 2,000 years ago. A comparative study including a reconstruction of Proto-Wintuan phonology, morphology and lexicon was undertaken by Shepherd.[7]
The Wintuan family is usually considered to be a member of the hypothetical Penutian language phylum[8] and was one of the five branches of the original California kernel of Penutian proposed by Roland B. Dixon and Alfred L. Kroeber.[9][10] However, recent studies suggest that the Wintuans independently entered California about 1,500 years ago from an earlier location somewhere in Oregon.[11] The Wintuan pronominal system closely resembles that of Klamath, while there are numerous lexical resemblances between Northern Wintuan and Alsea that appear to be loans.[12][13][14]
Dixon, Roland B.; Kroeber, Alfred L. (1913a). "New linguistic families in California". American Anthropologist. 15 (4): 647–655. doi:10.1525/aa.1913.15.4.02a00050.
Golla, Victor (1997). "The Alsea-Wintu connection". International Journal of American Linguistics. 63: 157–170. doi:10.1086/466317.
Golla, Victor (2007). "Linguistic Prehistory". In Jones, Terry L.; Klar, Kathryn A. (eds.). California Prehistory: Colonization, Culture, and Complexity. New York: Altamira Press. pp. 71–82. ISBN978-0-7591-0872-1.
Golla, Victor (2011). California Indian languages. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN978-0-520-26667-4.
Liedtke, Stefan (2007). The Relationship of Wintuan to Plateau Penutian. LINCOM studies in Native American linguistics. Vol. 55. Munich: Lincom Europa. ISBN978-3-89586-357-8.
Pitkin, Harvey (1984). Wintu grammar. University of California publications in linguistics. Vol. 94. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN0-520-09612-6.
Shepherd, Alice (2006). Proto-Wintun. University of California publications in linguistics. Vol. 137. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Shipley, William F. (1978). "Native Languages of California". In Sturtevant, William C.; Heizer, Robert F. (eds.). Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 8: California. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. pp. 80–90. ISBN0-16-004578-9.
Dixon, Roland B.; Kroeber, Alfred L. (1919). "Linguistic families of California". University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology. 16. Berkeley: University of California: 47–118.
Grant, Anthony (1997). "Coast Oregon Penutian". International Journal of American Linguistics. 63: 144–156. doi:10.1086/466316.
Pitkin, Harvey (1985). Wintu dictionary. University of California publications in linguistics. Vol. 95. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN0-520-09613-4.
Schlichter, Alice (1981). Wintu Dictionary (Report). Survey of California and Other Indian Languages. Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California.
Shepherd, Alice (1989). Wintu texts. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN0-520-09748-3.
Whistler, Kenneth W. (February 19–21, 1977). "Wintun Prehistory: An Interpretation based on Linguistic Reconstruction of Plant and Animal Nomenclature". Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 3. Berkeley: 157–174. doi:10.3765/bls.v3i0.3287.
Whistler, Kenneth W. (1980). Proto-Wintun kin classification: A case study in reconstruction of a complex semantic system (PhD thesis). Berkeley: University of California.
