December 2020 draft of an article prepared for the The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America: A Comprehensive Guide, ed. Carmen Jany, Marianne Mithun & Keren Rice, De Gruyter Mouton. Please do not quote without permission of the author:
[email protected]. Pomoan Eugene Buckley Pomoan is a well-defined family of seven languages in northern California. Their territories are adjacent or in close proximity, but they are surrounded by languages of several different families. The Pomoan languages are similar in many aspects of sound, word, and sentence structure, yet also have enough diversity to serve as an excellent case study in language change over time, as well as the effects of contact among related and unrelated languages. Notable properties in all or most of the languages are large inventories of consonants; complex verb structure including a system of instrumental prefixes; person marking with independent pronouns rather than on the verb itself; case-marking that permits relatively free word order; and switch reference suffixes for the tracking of reference among clauses. 1 Introduction The Pomoan family consists of seven languages spoken in northern California. They were named by Barrett (1908) according to their relative location. Six contiguous languages are located in Sonoma, Mendocino, and Lake counties: Eastern and Southeastern Pomo around Clear Lake; and Northern, Central, Southern, and Southwestern Pomo along the coast. Northeastern Pomo, an outlier in many ways, is separated from the rest of the family by the unrelated Yuki and Patwin languages. The original term Southwestern Pomo has been replaced by the indigenous word Kashaya (Oswalt 1961: 1); no similar term is in widespread use for the other languages (as opposed to tribal groups), but Salt Pomo has sometimes been used for Northeastern, a translation of a native term (Walker 2016a).