The Washo language (Washo: wá:šiw ʔítlu) (also Washoe) is an endangered Native American language isolate spoken by the Washo on the California–Nevada border in the drainages of the Truckee and Carson Rivers, especially around Lake Tahoe. While there are very few speakers of Washo today (only 10 according to some; 252 according to the 2000 US Census), there are Washo-language programs aimed at increasing the number of proficient speakers. The speakers of Washo at the end of the twentieth century included 64 individuals between the ages of 5 and 17, 4 of whom have limited English proficiency.
Ethnographic Washo speakers belonged to the Great Basin culture area and they were the only non-Numic group of that area. The language has borrowed from the neighboring Uto-Aztecan, Maiduan and Miwokan languages and is connected to both the Great Basin and California sprachbunds.
Read more about Washo Language: Regional Variation, Genetic Relations, Morphology and Syntax, History
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“In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we do not know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)