The Siuslaw language is currently spoken by the Siuslaw tribal members as a dual language (English being the other language). It consists of two similar dialects:

• Upper Umpqua (Siuslaw proper)
• Lower Umpqua

The documentation consists of a 12-page vocabulary of both dialects by James Owen Dorsey

James Owen Dorsey

James Owen Dorsey was an American ethnologist, linguist, and Episcopalian missionary who contributed to the description of the Ponca, Omaha, and other southern Siouan languages. He also collected much material on beliefs and institutions, although most of his manuscripts have not been published...

, three months of fieldwork by Leo J. Frachtenberg in 1911 with a non-English-speaking native speaker of the Lower Umpqua dialect and her Alsean husband (who spoke it as a second language), audio recordings of vocabulary from both dialects by Morris Swadesh

Morris Swadesh

Morris Swadesh was an influential and controversial American linguist. In his work, he applied basic concepts in historical linguistics to the Indigenous languages of the Americas...

 in 1953, and a few hours of fieldwork with three Upper Umpqua speakers by Dell Hymes

Dell Hymes

Dell Hathaway Hymes was a sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist whose work dealt primarily with languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics"...

in 1954. Frachtenberg (1914, 1922) and Hymes (1966) are publications based on their material.

External links

• Languages of Oregon – Siuslaw