Chukchansi Yokuts

Abstract

Chukchansi belongs to the Yokuts language family (ISO 639 code: yok) ancestrally spoken in the San Joaquin valley of Central California and in the adjacent foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The headquarters of the Chukchansi tribe is located in Coarsegold and many members of the tribe live in and around Madera and Fresno counties. As shown in the map in Figure 1, there are three major territories of the Yokuts: Northern Valley Yokuts, Foothill Yokuts, and Southern Valley Yokuts. While the territory of the Chukchansi is in the foothills area, the dialect is linguistically Northern Valley (Whistler & Golla 1986), as shown in Figure 2. Yawelmani, a Yokuts language that has been a subject of extensive linguistic research (e.g. Newman 1944, Archangeli 1983, Weigel 2005), is a dialect of the Southern Valley Yokuts. It is unclear to what extent Yokuts varieties are mutually intelligible. Yokuts is often considered to be a part of a larger Penutian language family (e.g. Dixon & Kroeber 1913, Sapir 1921, DeLancey & Golla 1997). While the status of Penutian as a macro-family is disputed, Yokuts is very likely related to the Miwok and Costanoan language families of California (Callaghan 1997).