Upper Umpqua language
| (Upper) Umpqua | |
|---|---|
| Native to | USA |
| Region | Oregon (Umpqua Valley) |
| Extinct | ca. 1950 |
Dené–Yeniseian?
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | xup |
xup | |
qhk (not ISO) | |
| Glottolog | uppe1436 |
Upper Umpqua is an extinct Athabaskan language formerly spoken along the south fork of the Umpqua River in west-central Oregon in the vicinity of modern Roseburg by Upper Umpqua (Etnemitane) people. It has been extinct for at least fifty years and little is known about it beyond the fact that it belongs to the same Oregon Athabaskan cluster of Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages as the Coquille and Rogue River dialects and Chetco-Tolowa. The most important documentation of Upper Umpqua is the extensive vocabulary obtained by Horatio Hale in 1841 (published in Hale 1846), although 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 Penutian language Lower Umpqua (Kuitsh or Siuslaw) that was spoken closer to the coast in the same area.
References
- Golla, Victor (2011). California Indian Languages. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-052-026667-4.
- Hale, Horatio (1846). Ethnography and Philology. Vol. 6 of United States Exploring Expedition.... Under the Command of Charles Wilkes, U.S.N. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard.