Talk:Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages

Adding and revising content based on 2021 dissertation

Hey all, I just figured I would make a post here so anyone who's curious about the changes I'm gonna be making knows what's up and has a place to raise any disagreements or concerns. I'm a linguistics student and I've noticed for a while that the wikipedia space around Oregon Athabaskan languages is somewhat out of date with recent scholarship, particularly in the field on language revitalization, but with Jaeci Hall's dissertation published last fall I think it's a good opportunity to get my hands on some sources, "be bold", and overhaul the presentation of these languages on wikipedia.

The main thing at issue is the dual question of phylogeny and terminology. Hall 2021 and many others in the speaker/language revitalization communities consider Lower Rogue River, Upper Rogue River, and Chetco-Tolowa to be three major dialect groups of one single language, Nuu-wee-ya', rather than separate languages as they're represented here and in older literature. Additionally, while there is not yet and may never be a scholarly consensus due to these being underdocumented language varieties, the breakdown of subdialects represented throughout wikipedia does not align with more recent scholarship, nor is it even internally consistent. Finally, the terminology and orthographies used for languages, dialects and people groups throughout the pages in this space are inconsistent and often unsourced, and links often do not lead where they should.

Over the next few months (vague window of time, highly dependent on other responsibilities) I hope to make significant edits to this page as well as the following pages to address these three concerns.

• Tututni language (which I expect to propose moving to Lower Rogue River language)
• Tututni
• Galice language (which I expect to propose moving to Upper Rogue River language)
• Shasta Costa
• Rogue River Indians

In addition, I will make some minor edits to other pages to establish a consistent terminology and description across wikipedia:

• Template:Athabaskan languages
• "Category:Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages"
• Template:Languages of Oregon
• Athabaskan languages
• Coquille people
• Coquille Indian Tribe
• Tolowa language
• Upper Umpqua language
• Siletz
• Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians

Finally, I intend to create a page for the macro-language which comprises the Lower Rogue River, Upper Rogue River, and Chetco-Tolowa dialect groups, as much recent scholarship, language revitalization efforts, and materials from the tribes refer to them collectively as one language or dialect continuum. I am unsure of the correct name for this page, which is why I'm waiting on creating it. Most of the linguistics collections of languages don't recognize any subgrouping below Oregon Athabaskan, and in fact they tend to conflict even on what the constituent dialects are and what they should be called. The best name for the article, in my opinion, is Nuu-wee-ya as that is the most common designation for the language in a few places on the internet, including in Jaeci Hall's 2021 dissertation on the language which is the most recent authoritative source. My only hesitation is that it's an endonym and relatively new in usage in English, so hasn't been used, as far as I can tell, at all in linguistics outside of the language revitalization subfield. Then again, this being an underdocumented, previously extinct indigenous language undergoing language revitalization, that subfield is perhaps the most relevant place to look. I'm open to more discussion along these lines either here or on my talk page, where I will be more or less reproducing this post. Koricind (talk) 22:26, 11 April 2022 (UTC)