Mutsun is both: a name of one sub-group of the Ohlone

Ohlone

The Ohlone people, also known as the Costanoan, are a Native American people of the central California coast. When Spanish explorers and missionaries arrived in the late 18th century, the Ohlone inhabited the area along the coast from San Francisco Bay through Monterey Bay to the lower Salinas Valley...

 indigenous people

Indigenous peoples of the Americas

The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...

 of Alta California

Alta California

Alta California was a province and territory in the Viceroyalty of New Spain and later a territory and department in independent Mexico. The territory was created in 1769 out of the northern part of the former province of Las Californias, and consisted of the modern American states of California,...

; and the name of the native language the Mutsun tribes spoke.

The people

Mutsun (also known as San Juan Bautista Costanoan) is an extinct Utian language

Utian languages

Utian is a family of indigenous languages spoken in the central and north portion of California, United States. The Miwok and Ohlone peoples both spoke languages in the Utian linguistic group...

 in the Ohlone/Costanoan

Ohlone

The Ohlone people, also known as the Costanoan, are a Native American people of the central California coast. When Spanish explorers and missionaries arrived in the late 18th century, the Ohlone inhabited the area along the coast from San Francisco Bay through Monterey Bay to the lower Salinas Valley...

 language family that was spoken in Northern California

Northern California

Northern California is the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. The San Francisco Bay Area , and Sacramento as well as its metropolitan area are the main population centers...

 by the division of the Ohlone

Ohlone

The Ohlone people, also known as the Costanoan, are a Native American people of the central California coast. When Spanish explorers and missionaries arrived in the late 18th century, the Ohlone inhabited the area along the coast from San Francisco Bay through Monterey Bay to the lower Salinas Valley...

 who lived in the Mission San Juan Bautista

Mission San Juan Bautista

Mission San Juan Bautista was founded on June 24, 1797 in what is now the San Juan Bautista Historic District of San Juan Bautista, California. Barracks for the soldiers, a nunnery, the Jose Castro House, and other buildings were constructed around a large grassy plaza in front of the church and...

 area.

The language

Ascencion Solorsano, who died in 1930, was the last native speaker of Mutsun. Mutsun went extinct from a gradual process of the Mutsun being forced to switch to speaking Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 and English. The Spanish wrote a grammar of the language, and linguist John Peabody Harrington

John Peabody Harrington

John Peabody Harrington was an American linguist and ethnologist and a specialist in the native peoples of California. Harrington is noted for the massive volume of his documentary output, most of which has remained unpublished: the shelf space in the Library of Congress dedicated to his work...

 collected very extensive notes on the language from Solorsano. Harrington's field notes formed the basis of the grammar of Mutsun written by Marc Okrand

Marc Okrand

Marc Okrand is an American linguist and is most notable as the creator of the Klingon language, which he speaks.-Biography:Okrand worked with Native American languages. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1972...

 as a University of California

University of California

The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...

 dissertation in 1977, which to this day remains the only grammar ever written of any Costanoan language. Many Mutsun people who live in California today are trying to restore their language.

Consonants

	Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals...	Dental/ Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...	Retroflex Retroflex consonant A retroflex consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants, especially in Indology...	Alveolo-palatal Alveolo-palatal consonant In phonetics, alveolo-palatal consonants are palatalized postalveolar sounds, usually fricatives and affricates, articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate... / Palatal palatalised	Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....	Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...	m /m/	n /n/		nY /nʲ/
Stop Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...	p /p/	t /t/	tR /ʈ/	tY /tʲ/	k /k/	/ʔ/
Affricate		c /ts/	č /ts̠/
Fricative		s /s/	sY /ʃ/			h /h/
Central Approximant	w /w/			y /j/
Lateral approximant		l /l/		lY /lʲ/
Flap Flap consonant In phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator is thrown against another.-Contrast with stops and trills:...		r /r/

Vowels

	Front	Back
Close	i /i/	u /u/
Close-mid		o /o/
Open-mid	e /ɛ/
Open		a /ɑ/

Vocabulary

English	Mutsun
one	hemetca
two	tRhin
three	kaphan
four	utRit
five	parwes
six	nakitci
seven	takitci
eight	tayitmin
nine	pakki
ten	tansakte

Notable Mutsun Ohlone people

• 1913 – Barbara Solorsano died 1913, Mutsun linguistic consultant to C. Hart Merriam 1902-04, from San Juan Bautista (Teixeira 1997:33, 40).
• 1930 – Ascención Solorsano de Cervantes, died 1930, renowned Mutsun doctor, principal linguistic and cultural informant to J. P. Harrington (Ortiz 1994:133).

External links

• Amah-Mutsun Tribe Website
• Grammar of Mutsun by Arroyo de la Cuesta, Felipe (1842) (in Spanish)
• Mutsun language overview at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
  Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
  The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at the University of California at Berkeley documents, catalogs, and archives the indigenous languages of the Americas...
  
  

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