Nisenan language

E432676

The Nisenan language is an endangered Native American language traditionally spoken by the Nisenan people of the Sierra Nevada foothills and Sacramento Valley region of Northern California.

All labels observed (1)

Label Occurrences
Nisenan language canonical 3

How this entity was disambiguated

Statements (46)

Predicate Object
instanceOf Native American language
endangered language
indigenous language of California
alternativeName Neeseen NERFINISHED
Neseenan NERFINISHED
Nisenan Maidu NERFINISHED
Southern Maidu NERFINISHED
associatedWith Nisenan traditional territory
country United States of America
surface form: United States
documentedBy linguist William Shipley
documentedIn archival recordings
grammatical descriptions
lexicons
endangermentCause language shift to English
ethnicGroup Nisenan people NERFINISHED
family Maiduan languages NERFINISHED
hasDialect Foothill Nisenan (reported)
Valley Nisenan (reported)
hasGrammarCategory aspectual distinctions in verbs
case-marking on nouns
complex verbal morphology
higherFamily Penutian (proposed) NERFINISHED
ISO639-3 nsz
languageFamily Maiduan NERFINISHED
linguisticTypology head-marking
morphologyType agglutinative
neighboringLanguage Konkow language
Maidu language NERFINISHED
Wintu language NERFINISHED
phonologicalFeature contrastive vowel length
rich consonant inventory
region Northern California
Sacramento Valley NERFINISHED
Sierra Nevada foothills NERFINISHED
revitalizationEffort community language classes
documentation projects
spokenBy few elderly speakers
state California, United States
surface form: California
status severely endangered
subfamily Maiduan NERFINISHED
traditionalUse ceremonial speech
everyday communication (historically)
oral literature
UNESCOStatus severely endangered (approximate classification)
wordOrder SOV-dominant
writingSystem Latin alphabet
surface form: Latin script

How these facts were elicited

Referenced by (3)

Full triples — surface form annotated when it differs from this entity's canonical label.

California Penutian languages hasPart Nisenan language
Maiduan languages hasPart Nisenan language
Nisenan language Nisenan language