Wiyot (also Wishosk) or Soulatluk (lit. 'your jaw') is an Algic language spoken by the Wiyot people of Humboldt Bay, California. The language's last native speaker, Della Prince, died in 1962.
Wiyot, along with its geographical neighbor, the Yurok language, were first identified as relatives of the Algonquian languages by Edward Sapir in 1913, though this classification was disputed for decades in what came to be known as the Ritwan controversy. Due to the enormous geographical separation of Wiyot and Yurok from all other Algonquian languages, the validity of their genetic link was hotly contested by leading Americanist linguists; as Ives Goddard put it, the issue "has profound implications for the prehistory of North America". However, by the 1950s, the genetic relationship between the Algonquian languages and Wiyot and Yurok had been established to the satisfaction of most, if not all, researchers, giving rise to the term Algic to refer to the Algonquian languages together with Wiyot and Yurok.
The Wiyot Tribal Government is fostering a revival of the language through videos, online dictionaries, and an annual Wiyot language calendar.
Phonology
Consonants
Karl V. Teeter published the first modern descriptive grammar of Wiyot in 1964. His data, supplied by Della Prince soon before her death, was crucial to the establishment of the genetic relationship between Algonquin and Wiyot, and effectively ended the scholarly conflict surrounding the issue. All of the linguistic data below comes from his work, published by the University of California Press.
The consonants of Wiyot, as recorded by Teeter, are given in this chart, with a Practical Orthography in boldface and the IPA equivalents in brackets.
The grapheme is used for the fricative word-initially and for the stop otherwise.
Vowels
Syllables
Wiyot syllables always begin with consonants or consonant clusters, which are followed by a vowel. This vowel may be long or short. If the vowel is short, the syllable must end in the same consonant that begins the next syllable. Therefore, all non-final syllables are heavy, acquiring either a CVV or CVC structure. Word final syllables may or may not be heavy.
These syllable-final consonants are lengthened in speech, but do not appear as doubled letters in transcription. For example, in the word , meaning 'flounder', the 'l' is lengthened. Thus, the first syllable ends with 'l', and the second begins with 'l', and both syllables are considered heavy.
Teeter describes the "weight" of Wiyot syllables as one of the language's most salient features for speakers of English. He adds that voiced sounds tend to be exceptionally long in spoken Wiyot, a feature that adds to the perceived phonological heaviness of the language.
Pitch accent
In speech, Wiyot words are grouped into pitch accent phrases, which are separated by commas when written. Within these phrases, regular patterns of syllable stress and vowel length emerge. Stress, pitch and vowel length increase gradually from the beginning of the accent phrase until the culminative syllable in the accent phrase is reached, after which pitch precipitously drops, except when it is the final syllable of the accent phrase. In such a situation, the accent phrase would end on a high pitch.
The vowel of the culminative syllable bears either an acute or grave accent, the latter indicating a high pitch, and the former a high pitch which rapidly falls. The grave accent appears only when the culminative syllable is the final syllable of a breath group, which are groups of accent phrases.
The ends of breath groups are marked by periods, and are notably lower in relative pitch. Accent phrases towards the end of a breath group follow the same pattern of gradual lengthening and pitch increase, though the relative pitch is lower with respect to the preceding accent phrases. Breath groups end with a general weakening of articulatory force, which is followed by a noticeable interval of silence.
Despite the intricacies of pitch involved in Wiyot, the total pitch range of the spoken language is only a fraction of that of English, for example.
Example
'She began to throw aside the boards of the house, thinking in vain, 'I'll take that man back.' She never took him back.'