Esselen language

language
name=Esselen
nativename=Huelel |familycolor=Isolate
states=USA
region=Big Sur (California)


speakers=Extinct
fam1=Language isolate
iso1=|iso2=nai|iso3=esq

Esselen (Esselen: Huelel) is a language isolate that was spoken by the Esselen Native Americans on the Central Coast of California, south of Monterey.

Esselen may have been the first California language to become extinct after being documented during the Hispanic period. Very little information on this language has survived. There are a few word lists that were collected during the Mission era and later in the nineteenth centuries. No native speakers survived into the twentieth century, but additional data on Esselen were collected from Ohlone speakers, notably by John Peabody Harrington in the 1930s (Mithun 1999:411-413).

In 1913, it was proposed that Esselen was an isolate within the hypothetical Hokan stock. However, many subsequent scholars have questioned the validity of Hokan as a genetic linguistic group, leaving Esselen without any known relatives.

References

* Mithun, Marianne. 1999. "The Languages of Native North America". Cambridge University Press.