Pomoan
Pomo
Geographic distribution	California
Ethnicity	Pomo people
Linguistic classification	Hokan ? Pomoan
Subdivisions	†Northeastern †Eastern Southeastern Western
Language codes
Glottolog	pomo1273
Pre-contact distribution of Pomoan languages

ThePomoan, orPomo/ˈpoʊmoʊ/,^[1] languages are a small family of seven languages indigenous to northernCalifornia spoken by thePomo people, whose ancestors lived in the valley of theRussian River and theClear Lake basin. Majority of languages are extinct, and onlyKashaya has little more than ten speakers.

John Wesley Powell, who was the first to define the extent of the family, noted that its boundaries were the Pacific Ocean to the west,Wintuan territory in the Sacramento Valley to the east, the head of theRussian River to the north, andBodega Head and present-daySanta Rosa to the south (Powell 1891:87-88). OnlyNortheastern Pomo was not contiguous with the other Pomoan languages, being separated by an intervening region ofWintuan speakers.

Pomoan is a family of seven languages. Their relationship to one another was first formally recognized byJohn Wesley Powell, who proposed that they be called the "Kulanapan Family" (Powell 1891). Like many of Powell's obscure nomenclatural proposals, particularly for California languages, "Kulanapan" was ignored. In its place,Pomo,^[2] the term used by Indians and Whites alike forNorthern Pomo, was arbitrarily extended to include the rest of the family.

All seven languages were first systematically identified as Pomo bySamuel Barrett (1908). To avoid complications, Barrett named each of the Pomoan languages according to its geographic position ("Northern Pomo," "Southeastern Pomo," etc.) This naming convention quickly gained wide acceptance and is still in general use, except for the substitution of "Kashaya" for Barrett's "Southwestern Pomo". Barrett's geographical language names often lead those unfamiliar with the Pomoan languages to the misconception that they are dialects of a single "Pomo" language.

Various genetic subgroupings of the family have been proposed, although the general outlines have remained fairly consistent. The current consensus view (cf.Mithun 1999) favors the tree presented in Oswalt (1964), shown below.

Essentially identical versions of this classifications are presented in Oswalt and McLendon's "Introduction" to the Pomo chapters in Heizer, ed. (1978) and in Campbell (1997). The most important dissenter wasAbraham M. Halpern, one of the few linguists since Barrett's time to collect comparative data on all of the Pomoan languages.

Halpern's classification differed from Oswalt's mainly in the placement ofNortheastern Pomo. Instead of considering it an independent branch of the family, Halpern grouped it with the languages of Oswalt's "Western" branch. He suggested the possibility that Northeastern Pomo represents a recent migration of a Northern Pomo subgroup (Halpern 1964; Golla 2011:106-7).

Proto-Pomo reconstructions by McLendon (1973):^[3]

• Boontling – a constructed dialect of English incorporating Pomo words

• Central, Northern and Southern Pomo Language Apps are available in the App Store. Southern Pomo currently has 2 apps available. One called Learn Southern Pomo - alphabet and one called Southern Pomo Language - Intro.

• Barrett, Samuel A. (1908).The Ethno-Geography of the Pomo and Neighboring Indians. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, 6.[1]^{[permanent dead link]}
• Campbell, Lyle. (1997).American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press.ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
• Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996).Languages. Handbook of North American Indians (W. C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution.ISBN 0-16-048774-9.
• Golla, Victor. (2011).California Indian Languages. Berkeley: University of California Press.ISBN 978-0-520-26667-4.
• McLendon, Sally & Robert L. Oswalt (1978). "Pomo: Introduction". InCalifornia, ed. Robert F. Heizer. Vol. 8 ofHandbook of North American Indians, ed. William C. Sturtevant, pp. 274–88. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.ISBN 978-0-16-004574-5.
• Mithun, Marianne. (1999).The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk);ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
• Powell, John Wesley. (1891).Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico. Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 7:1-142. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.[2]
• Chestnut, Victor King (1902).Plants used by the Indians of Mendocino County, California.Government Printing Office. Retrieved24 August 2012.

Wiktionary has a list of reconstructed forms atAppendix:Proto-Pomo reconstructions

• Pomo (Yakaya, Yokaia, Shanel, Kábinapek)(Native Languages of the Americas)
• Kashaya (Kashia, Southwestern Pomo)(Native Languages of the Americas)
• Pomo/Kashaya Bibliography
• Pomo People: Brief History
• "New wellness center hosts first Pomo language workshop".Lake County News Reports. 2012-04-15. Retrieved2012-08-08.

• Pomoan languages
• Language families
• Indigenous languages of California
• Endangered Indigenous languages of the Americas
• Pomo culture

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• Articles with short description
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