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Esselen
Huelel
Native to	United States
Region	Big Sur (California)
Ethnicity	Esselen
Extinct	19th century
Revival	1990s[1]
Language family	Hokan? Esselen
Dialects	Western Eastern
Language codes
ISO 639-3	esq
Linguist List	esq.html
Glottolog	esse1238

Esselen is the now-extinct language of theEsselen (or self-designatedHuelel) Nation, which aboriginally occupied the mountainousCentral Coast of California, immediately south ofMonterey (Shaul 1995)^{[full citation needed]}. It was probably alanguage isolate, though has been included as a part of the hypotheticalHokan proposal.

The nameEsselen was derived from a village name. The Esselen people referred to their own language asHuelel. The name was recorded byFelipe Arroyo de la Cuesta on May 18, 1832, atSoledad Mission from his informant Eusebio (native nameSutasis) (cf.villel 'tongue' as recorded byDionisio Alcalá Galiano) (Shaul 1995).

French explorerLapérouse, who visited Monterey in 1786, reported:^[2]

The country of the Ecclemachs [Esselen] extends above 20 leagues to the [south]eastward of Monterey. Their language is totally different from all those of their neighbors, and has even more resemblance to the languages of Europe than to those of the Americas. This grammatical phenomenon, the most curious in this respect ever observed on the continent, will, perhaps, be interesting to those of the learned, who seek, in the analogy of languages, the history and genealogy of transplanted nations.

Esselen may have been the first Californian language to becomeextinct. Although it was spoken by many of the early converts atMission Carmel, its use rapidly declined during the Hispanic period. Very little information on the vocabulary and grammar of Esselen was preserved. About 350 words and phrases and a few complete sentences have been preserved in literature,^[2] including a short bilingual catechism (for a summary see Mithun 1999:411–413 and Golla 2011:114). By the beginning of the 20th century the only data on Esselen that investigators such asKroeber andHarrington could collect were a few words remembered by speakers of other Indian languages in the area.^{[citation needed]}

H. W. Henshaw thought that Esselen represented a monotypic linguistic family. Others, such as Shaul (2019),^[3] have assigned the language to the proposedHokan family.

Shaul (2019) also notes that Esselen has had extensive contact with theChumashan languages, with Esselen and Chumashan sharing many common lexical items.^[3]

The Esselen language consisted of the Western and Eastern dialects. Documentation of Western Esselen was based on data collected atMission Carmel. It was spoken by the Excelen local tribe, and likely also the Ecgeajan local tribes to the south along theBig Sur coast, although the Ecgeajan subdialect is unattested. Eastern Esselen was documented byArroyo, and was based on data collected atMission Soledad, which hostedArroyo Seco local tribes. Eastern Esselen was spoken by the Eslenajan local tribe, and probably also by the Aspasniajan and Imunajan local tribes.^[3]

The Esselen language was spoken by five local tribes. Each of the five local tribes spoke a separate subdialect.^[3]

TheSanta Lucia Mountains formed the heart of the Esselen homeland.

Each Esselen district consisted of a local tribe with their own patrilineal clans. Members of the clans were exogamous, marrying members of other clans but within the local tribe.^[3]

Local Esselen tribes and their demographics are surveyed in Milliken (1990: 59).^[4]

Breschini and Haversat (1994: 82–88) give the following numbers of villages and population estimates for each of the five Esselen tribes. Population estimates are calculated by multiplying the number of villages by either 30 or 40 (i.e., the presumed number of individuals per village).^[5]

Sound correspondences between the Western and Eastern dialects:^[3]

Lexical differences between the Western and Eastern dialects:^[3]

/p/ has allophones of[f] and[pf]./t/ has an allophone of[tʃ].^[6]

Subject pronouns in Western Esselen (Shaul 2019: 89):

	sg	pl
1	ene ~ eni	leč-s; lex
2	nemi ~ nimi	nemič; nemux
3	lal	lač; lax

Subject pronouns in Eastern Esselen (Shaul 2019: 89):

	sg	pl
1	ene ~ ne	leṭ; lex
2	name	nomeṭ; nomux
3	huiniki	laṭ; lax

Word order is primarilySOV (Shaul 2019).

Shaul (1995) reconstitutes Esselen vocabulary, synthesized from various historical sources, as follows.^[6] Forms fromAlfred L. Kroeber are marked by (Kr).

• Golla, Victor. 2011.California Indian Languages. University of California Press.
• Mithun, Marianne. 1999.The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge University Press.
• Shaul, David Leedom (1995)."The Huelel (Esselen) Language".International Journal of American Linguistics.61 (2):191–239.ISSN 0020-7071.

Wiktionary has a word list atAppendix:Esselen word list

• Esselen language overview at theSurvey of California and Other Indian Languages
• Spanish-Rumsen-Esselen Glossary, 1802
• Salinan-Esselen vocabulary, p. 73
• Esselen at the California Language ArchiveArchived 2013-04-24 at theWayback Machine
• OLAC resources in and about the Esselen language
• Esselen, The World Atlas of Language Structures

• Esselen
• Indigenous languages of California
• Language isolates of North America
• Extinct languages of North America
• Hokan languages
• Languages extinct in the 19th century
• 19th-century disestablishments in California

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