Documenting Pomoan Languages: Textual Dictionary of Southern Pomo and Dictionary and Grammatical Sketch of Northeastern Pomo

FAIN: FN-230222-15

Neil A. Walker
San Joaquin Delta College (Stockton, CA 95207-6370)

The seven Pomoan languages of Northern California are mutually unintelligible and now moribund or extinct. The PI has worked extensively with two of these languages, Southern Pomo and Northeastern Pomo and is the last linguist to interact with a native speaker of Southern Pomo (who passed away in 2014).  The PI will archive previously collected data and produce a textual dictionary of Southern Pomo, based on a corpus of traditional narratives.  The PI has also been gathering extant data on Northeastern Pomo, whose last speakers passed away forty years ago.  He will produce a dictionary database and grammatical sketch exploring the unique grammatical and phonological features of Northeastern Pomo, an enigmatic member of the Pomoan family.  The proposed project would make crucial data on Southern Pomo and Northeastern Pomo available to scholars and the public for the first time. (Edited by staff)

Associated Products

A Working Lexicon of the Northeastern Pomo Language (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: A Working Lexicon of the Northeastern Pomo Language
Author: Neil Alexander Walker
Abstract: Northeastern Pomo (a.k.a. Salt Pomo) is an extinct indigenous language of California. This is a working database that includes the majority of attested Northeastern Pomo words. It is being edited, updated, and expanded, and care should be used when consulting it.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://wieldoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Walker_NA_Northeastern_Pomo_Dictionary_Working_Draft_10-2016.pdf
Access Model: open access

A Working Draft of a Textual Dictionary of the Southern Pomo Language (Web Resource)
Title: A Working Draft of a Textual Dictionary of the Southern Pomo Language
Author: Neil Alexander Walker
Abstract: This database includes lexical entries from unpublished Southern Pomo data collected by Abraham Halpern and Robert Oswalt, which are archived at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at the University of California at Berkeley.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://wieldoc.org/?page_id=542

A Grammar of Southern Pomo (Book)
Title: A Grammar of Southern Pomo
Author: Neil Alexander Walker
Abstract: A Grammar of Southern Pomo is the first comprehensive description of the Southern Pomo language, which lost its last fluent speaker in 2014. Southern Pomo is one of seven Pomoan languages once spoken in the vicinity of Clear Lake and the Russian River drainage of California. Prior to European contact, a third of all Pomoan peoples spoke Southern Pomo, and descendants of these speakers are scattered across several present-day reservations. These descendants have recently initiated efforts to revitalize the language. The unique culture of Southern Pomo speakers is embedded in the language in several ways. There are separate words for the many different species of oak trees and their different acorns, which were the people’s staple cuisine. The kinship system is unusually rich both semantically and morphologically, with terms marked for possession, generation, number, and case. Verbs similarly encode the ancient interactions of speakers with their land in more than a dozen directional suffixes indicating specific paths of movement. A Grammar of Southern Pomo sheds new light on a relatively unknown Indigenous California speech community. In many instances Neil Alexander Walker discusses phenomena that are rare or entirely unattested outside the language and challenges long-standing ideas about what human speech communities can create and pass on to children as well as the degree to which culture and place are inextricably woven into language.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/grammar-of-southern-pomo/oclc/1088535892&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: worldcat.org description
Secondary URL: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9781496217653/
Secondary URL Description: University of Nebraska Press site
Access Model: Not open access
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781496217653
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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