A middle branch on the map
When people hear “Athabaskan”, they think of the subarctic north or the Apache and Navajo Southwest. A third group of languages lies in between, geographically and in some respects in the family tree: the Athabaskan languages once spoken along the Pacific coast, in southwestern Washington, western Oregon and northwestern California. They are known as the Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages.
These languages are important because they show that Athabaskan is not simply a northern family that sent one branch to the Southwest. Speakers also lived on the Pacific coast, in landscapes of redwood and fir forest, rivers and ocean, and they developed ways of life that were quite different from both subarctic and desert ways. They also help linguists think about how the Athabaskan language family spread.
Languages and nations
The group is made up of many languages, spoken by many distinct nations. The most commonly named include the following, with the caution that spellings, preferred names and the number of separate languages differ among sources.
In Oregon and southwestern Washington:
- Tolowa (Dee-ni’), spoken in the far northwest of California and southwest of Oregon
- Upper Umpqua
- The Rogue River languages, including Tututni and Chetco, and Galice and Applegate
- Coquille (Mishikhwutmetunne)
- Kwalhioqua and Clatskanie, in southwestern Washington and northwestern Oregon
In northern California:
- Hupa, the language of the Hoopa Valley people, whose own name for the language is often written Na:tinixwe
- Chilula and Whilkut
- Mattole and Bear River
- The Eel River group, including Wailaki and Nongatl, Lassik, and Sinkyone
- Kato, also written Cahto
There are enough languages here that a complete list would be long, and some of them are known mostly from records made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Many nations of the area are active today, and their own names for themselves differ from the English names above.
What they share with other Athabaskan languages
Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages share the basic pattern of the family: elaborate verbs built from many parts, a fundamental set of vocabulary, and sounds such as glottal stops and ejectives. They also reflect changes that took place after the groups separated, and the coastal languages often differ in sound from the northern and southern languages. Speakers of Tolowa or Hupa could not understand Navajo or Apache, but a linguist can trace regular correspondences between them, which is how the relationship was established.
The wider resemblance is visible in the common word for “people” found in many Athabaskan languages. The form varies in the coastal languages, as it does elsewhere, and the details of any one form should come from the community’s own language materials.
Is it a single group?
A frequent question is whether Pacific Coast Athabaskan is a true subgroup, meaning one whose members descend from a single common ancestor that was separate from other Athabaskan languages, or whether it is a convenient label for languages that happen to be near each other.
The answer is uncertain. Many specialists have treated the languages as a geographic grouping, noting that the Oregon and California languages show different features and may not form a single branch of the tree. Others have argued for more specific subgroups within the area. Contact between neighboring languages of different families also complicates the picture, because languages in the same region can come to share features even when they are not closely related. Readers who encounter a diagram showing a neat three-way split should understand that this is a simplification and that research on classification continues.
How did Athabaskan reach the coast?
How speakers of Athabaskan languages came to live on the Pacific coast, and when, are debated questions. One line of thinking is that groups moved from the north toward the coast over a long period. Others stress that the area’s diversity might indicate a long stay. The evidence from archaeology, language and oral tradition does not yet give a simple answer, and archaeological evidence is hard to match to language families, since pottery and tools do not carry language with them.
This uncertainty parallels the debate over Athabaskan movement toward the Southwest, discussed under the Apachean migration. Apache nations’ own accounts of their origins and those of coastal nations are not the same as scholarly reconstructions, and each should be respected on its own terms.
Language revival today
The Athabaskan languages of the Pacific Coast went through serious loss, because of disease, displacement, violence and policies that discouraged Native languages. Some languages have no remaining first-language speakers, and some are known only from older recordings and notes.
Even so, revival efforts exist. Communities such as the Hoopa Valley Tribe, who speak Hupa, and the Tolowa Dee-ni’ Nation have supported language classes and teaching materials. In several cases archive recordings made by linguists decades ago are now being used by community members to rebuild their languages. Because programs and their status change, anyone seeking current information should go to the nations’ official websites.
This kind of work is closely comparable to Apache language revitalization, including the way it relies on elders, schools, recordings and community choices about what to share. The experiences of endangered Apache languages and of the coastal Athabaskan languages are different in detail, but similar in outline.
Why this branch matters
Three points follow from the Pacific Coast case.
- The Athabaskan family is not confined to a northern and a southern end. A third branch, in between, shows how complicated the history of the family is.
- A shared language family is not a shared nation. The Hupa, the Tolowa and the Apache have separate histories, governments and cultures.
- Local diversity can be great, and a single label can hide many peoples.
Readers who want more should look to the nations’ own cultural programs and to published grammars and dictionaries, many of which were prepared with community speakers.