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Show The Place of Shoshoni... The three central Numic languages, Panamint, Shoshoni, and Comanche, are very similar to each other so that speakers of these languages can often understand each other when they speak slowly and carefully. Panamint is the language used by the people who live in Death Valley and some nearby communities such as Lone Pine, California and Beatty, Nevada. These people call themselves "Shoshoni" or sometimes "California Shoshoni." The language is different enough from Shoshoni, so that it is useful to use the term "Panamint" when discussing language differences; it is a name that is used by linguists and anthropologiests when discussing the Numic languages. There never were very many Panamint speakers, perhaps originally only a few hunderd. Today there are only a handful of speakers, all older adults. When the Spaniards arrived in what is now the southwestern part of the United States, they introduced the horse to the Indians living in the Great Plains. Some of the Shoshoni peoples living in and near Wyoming found that they could much more easily hunt the buffalo on horse back. Some of them moved out of the original Shoshoni territory and into the southern Plains. These people became the Comanche. After being separated from their Shoshoni cousins for three centries, their language changed enough for it to be considered distinct from Shoshoni. The Shoshoni language was and still is spoken over a very wide area. Some of the communities where it is still spoken today include: Reese River, Austin, Fallon, Stillwater Reservation, Battle Mountian, Elko, Lee, Duckwater, Ely, and Wells (all in Nevada); Owyhee (Nevada and Idaho); Goshute (Nevada and Utah); Skull Valley, Tooele, and Washakie (all in Utah); Fort Hall (Idaho); and Wind River (Wyoming). Fallon and Stillwater were originally in Northern Paiute country, and most of the Shoshonis who now live there came Austin and Resse River. The Shoshoni changes just a little bit from one community to the next, which is to say there are differences in dialect in each community. We will have more to say about Shoshoni dialect differences later on. Maps and Family Trees The Uto-Aztecan languages can be put into a family tree in order to show the nature of the relationships between the various languages. The same information can also be shown in a classification, such as: |
