This articleshould specify the language of its non-English content using{{lang}} or{{langx}},{{transliteration}} for transliterated languages, and{{IPA}} for phonetic transcriptions, with an appropriateISO 639 code. Wikipedia'smultilingual support templates may also be used - notablytkm for Takelma.See why.(September 2024)

Takelma
Ta:kɛlmàʔn
Native to	United States
Region	Oregon,Rogue Valley along the middle course of theRogue River
Ethnicity	Takelma,Latgawa, Cow Creek band of Upper Umpqua
Extinct	1934, with the death ofFrances Johnson
Revival	Cow Creek band of Umpqua tribe has a small group of L2 speakers[1]
Language family	Language isolate
Dialects	Lower Upper (Latgawa) Takelma B Takelma H
Language codes
ISO 639-3	tkm
Glottolog	take1257
Takelma (south), with the Kalapuyan languages to the north
This article containsIPA phonetic symbols. Without properrendering support, you may seequestion marks, boxes, or other symbols instead ofUnicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA.

Takelma/təˈkɛlmə/ is the language that was spoken by theLatgawa andTakelma peoples and theCow Creek band of Upper Umpqua, inOregon, United States. The language was extensively described by the German-American linguistEdward Sapir in his graduate thesis,The Takelma Language of Southwestern Oregon (1912). Sapir's grammar together with hisTakelma Texts (1909) are the main sources of information on the language. Both are based on work carried out in 1906 with language consultantFrances Johnson (Takelma nameKʷìskʷasá:n),^[2] who lived on to become the last surviving fluent speaker. In 1934, with her death at the age of 99, the language became extinct. An English-Takelma dictionary is currently being created on the basis of printed sources with the aim of reviving the language.^[3]

The commonly used English name of the language is derived from Ta:-kɛlm-àʔn, theself-name of the Takelma people, which means "those dwelling along the Rogue River (Ta:-kɛlám)".^[a]

There were at least four Takelma dialects:^[4]

• Lower Takelma, Sapir's Takelma proper, spoken in theRogue Valley in southwestern Oregon
• Upper Takelma or Latgawa, spoken along the upperRogue River in southwestern Oregon
• Takelma B, known from a vocabulary recorded by W.H. Barnhardt in 1859
• Takelma H, known from a vocabulary recorded byW.B. Hazen in 1857

A few nouns are attested for all four dialects:^[5]

Takelma is accepted as one of the manylanguage isolates of North America. Writing in 1909, Sapir stated that "the Takelma language represents one of the distinct linguistic stocks of North America".^[6] He later revised his opinion, and assigned Takelma to the hypotheticalPenutian language family,^[b] a grouping that at present is not generally considered established.^[7] Over the years, several linguists have presented evidence which, in their view, linked Takelma to the other "Penutian" languages, in particular theKalapuyan languages. A reexamination of the evidence by Tarpent and Kendall (1998, unpublished) however showed that purported lexical and grammatical similarities between Takelma and other languages were erroneous, and they concluded that Takelma is indeed an isolate.^[8]

Takelma has 22 phonemic consonants which occur in normal speech. In addition, there are two consonants of restricted use:^[c]

Two consonants do not occur in normal everyday speech:voiceless alveolar lateral fricative /ɬ/ andvoiceless alveopalatal fricative /ɕ/. In the narration of myths, /ɬ/ is the "grizzly-bear prefix" which can be prefixed to any word in the reported speech of thegrizzly bear, symbolizing the animal's coarseness; and /ɕ/ is the "coyote prefix", prefixed to words in the reported speech of thecoyote; thus /kʷìti/ "where?" (normal speech), /ɬkʷìti/ (grizzly bear speaking), /ɕkʷìti/ (coyote speaking).^[9]

Consonants /s/ and /ts’/ have optionalalveopalatalallophones [ɕ] and [tɕ’], which occur mainly in word-initial position before a vowel, and intervocalically.^[10]

Semivowels /w/ and /y/ are vocalized in syllable-final position, for example:^[11]

/piliw-átʰ/ [piliwátʰ] "you jump" vs /piliw-tʰɛʔ/ [piliutʰɛʔ] "I jump"

/ka:y-àʔtʰ/ [ka:yàʔtʰ] "he will grow" vs /ka:y-kʰ/ [ka:ikʰ] "he grew"

Takelma has six vowel qualtities, with contrastive length: /a ɛ i o ʉ u/ and /a: ɛ: i: o: ʉ: u:/. The vowel /ɛ/ is open, /o/ is close.^[12] Sapir also notes the existence of close /e:/, as in [la:le:tʰam] "you became", [kane:hiʔ] "and then", which he considers to be an (apparently unconditioned) allophone of /i:/.^[13]

Stressed syllable are pronounced with apitch-accent, as described by Sapir:^[14]

1. a simple pitch distinctly higher than the normal pitch of unstressed speech;
2. a rising inflection that starts at, or a trifle above, the normal pitch, and gradually slides up to the same higher pitch referred to above;
3. a falling inflection that starts at, or generally somewhat higher than, the raised pitch of (1) and (2), and gradually slides down to fall either in the same or immediately following syllable, to pitch somewhat lower than the normal [high pitch].

The rising pitch (2) is clearly a conditioned realization of the high pitch (1) that occurs with syllables containing a long vowel, or syllables which end in a resonant /m n l w y/.^[14][15] High pitch can thus be said to be phonetically realized on the latter part of a long vowel, or on a syllable-final resonant:^[d]

There is no pitch in words that are pronounced without stress. As Sapir comments, "it not infrequently happens that the major part of a clause will thus be strung along with-out decided stress-accent until some emphatic noun or verb-form is reached", as in the sentence:

"All that precedes the main verb form /pʰɛlɛ̀xaʔ/ 'they went out to war' is relatively un-important, and hence is hurried over without anywhere receiving marked stress [or pitch]".^[16]

The transcription system used by Sapir (1909, 1912) is the then current version of theAmericanist phonetic notation, which has long since been superseded. Its use in the publications of Sapir and other linguists working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries now impedes accessibility to the modern linguist. Below is a table pairing Sapir's notations with theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Note especially Sapir's idiosyncratic way of marking pitch.

(Phones marked with * occur ininterjections and insound-symbolic forms, but not in normal speech; [ə] is alsoepenthetic.)

Takelma, like many Native American languages, ispolysynthetic meaning that one can link together many different morphemes to form a word. Therefore, one single word can often contain a lot of information that in English would be portrayed in a full sentence. This is mainly done by adding affixes to verbs.

Takelma has 6 different "tenses" listed below with the first (aorist) being the basic tense which is equivalent to the immediate future, present, and past.

1. Aorist
2. Potential
3. Future
4. Inferential
5. Present Imperative
6. Future Imperative

In Takelma, possession is marked by a set of affixes. Most of them are suffixes but there is one prefix. Below is a table of the four declensional sets.

Set I is only ever used with terms of kinship. For example:

Set II is used with bare stems or stems having the formant. For example:

Alternations between –t and –tʰ in set II and set IV is regular and predictable.

Set III is used with stems having other formants. For example:

Set IV is used in locative constructions. For example:

^[17]

^[18]

Takelma has a complex system of verbal pronominal suffixes and is also accompanied by the loss of case markers on nouns. This represents a complete shift to full head marking. In the 3rd person object marker in Takelma, the suffix –kʰwa which is realized on the verb. However the distribution of –kʰwa is very restricted.

For the 1st and 2nd person objects overt marking is required with clear difference between singular and plural. For 3rd person there is no difference between singular and plural and there is also alternation between the suffix –kʰwa and zero suffix.

The zero variant occurs with animates as well as inanimate, covert pronouns, and overt nominals.

However –kʰwa occurs in three distinct environments. First, when the subject is also 3rd person. Second, it is always used when the object is higher in animacy than the subject. This means that the object refers to a human also a mythic animal that is thought of as a human being. The third situation is when the subject and object are of equal animacy but the object outranks the subject in topicality.^[19]

These are listed by Sapir as follows:^[20]

• Achen, Paris (Jan 11, 2008)."Pair breathe life into dead language".Mail Tribune. Archived fromthe original on July 31, 2013. Retrieved22 April 2012.
• Aissen, Judith (2003)."Differential Coding, Partial Blocking, and Bidirectional OT".BLS 29: General Session and Parasession on Phonetic Sources of Phonological Patterns.29: 1.doi:10.3765/bls.v29i1.981.
• Golla, Victor (2011).California Indian Languages. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Kendall, D. (1982)."Some notes toward using Takelma data in historical and comparative work".Occasional Papers on Linguistics: Proceedings of the 1981 Hokan Languages Workshop and Penutian Languages Conference.10:78–81.
• Mithun, M. (1999).The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
• Mithun, M. (2018). "Language Isolates". In L. Campbell (ed.).Language isolates of North America. London and New York: Routledge.ISBN 978-1-138-82105-7.
• Sapir, Edward (1907). "Notes on the Takelma Indians of Southwestern Oregon".American Anthropologist.9 (2):251–275.doi:10.1525/aa.1907.9.2.02a00010.JSTOR 659586.
• Sapir, Edward (1909).Takelma Texts. Anthropological Publications of the University Museum. Vol. 2. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
• Sapir, Edward (1912).The Takelma Language of Southwestern Oregon. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
• Sapir, Edward (1990). Golla, Victor (ed.).Takelma Texts and Grammar. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.doi:10.1515/9783110846324.ISBN 978-3-11-012329-6.
• Comparative vocabulary of the languages spoken by the 'Umpqua,' 'Lower Rogue River' [Takelma] and 'Calapooia' tribes of Indians" (35 pp., original dated May 1859), California Language Archive

• OLAC resources in and about the Takelma language

• Takelma
• Penutian languages
• Indigenous languages of Oregon
• Indigenous languages of the Pacific Northwest Coast
• Extinct languages of North America
• Northwest Coast Sprachbund (North America)
• Language isolates of North America
• Languages extinct in the 1930s
• 1934 disestablishments in Oregon

• Articles containing Takelma-language text
• Pages with plain IPA
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Pages with non-English text lacking appropriate markup from September 2024
• Language articles with unreferenced extinction date
• Pages with interlinear glosses using two unnamed parameters