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
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)