The Chumash Languages  

On these pages you'll find general information about the Chumash languages.

1 – The family of Chumash languages
2 – How the Chumash languages put things together
3 – The Chumash languages compared   
4 – Surviving Chumash placenames
5 – Chumash Narrative Folklore and How People Spoke
6 – An image of the Chumash cosmos

   
 
Maria Solares
  
ki a spey e a up ma kiyaqlw a samala
Like a flower of this earth is our Samala language.
Maria Solares
 
A great deal of what we know about the Chumash language spoken in the Santa Ynez valley comes to us as a result of the patience and dedication of Maria Solares. Maria was born in 1842 and died in 1923.
Between approximately 1912 and 1919, Maria worked with John P. Harrington, a linguist who dedicated himself to recording as much as he could of the native languages of California, Chumash as well as many others.
Maria provided Harrington with a wealth of information on the language, beliefs, culture and customs of the Samala and their neighbors. Harrington was gifted with an extraordinarily keen ear for language and he recorded what Maria told him in meticulous detail. Harrington left around 10,000 pages of notes on Samala alone — now in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
“Samala” is what the Chumash people in the middle reaches of the Santa Ynez Valley originally called themselves. It’s also the name of their language. After the Spanish founded the mission Santa Ynez in 1804, they called the local Indians by the Spanish term “Inezeño” (also spelled Ineseño and Ynezeño). For decades the Samala language has been called Inezeño Chumash, just as the people of the Santa Barbara coast and their language are called Barbareño Chumash, and so on.

Native peoples all over California are reclaiming their original names for themselves, rather than going by terms coined by outsiders. For example, the Diegeño are now calling themselves Kumeyaay and the Gabrielino in Los Angeles County are calling themselves Tongva. In that same spirit, the members of the Santa Ynez Band have begun using the ancestral name for their people and their language. You’ll see the term Samala in the pages of this site and the printed dictionary, and you'll hear it on the pronunciation guide CD that accompanies the dictionary.

More precisely, the name of the language and people is samala — pronounced s–hamala, much like the s–h of the English word "grasshopper." however, it’s very likely that people who see the unusual sound combination s + h will assume it’s pronounced like English “sh,” so this site uses the easier spelling Samala — unless the word is being quoted in a Samala sentence.
 
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