Welcome to the web page of the Northern Paiute Language Project at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Northern Paiute Language
The people whose language today is called Northern Paiute live in a wide swath of territory in the western United States that extends from Mono Lake in California east into Nevada and north into Oregon and Idaho. While the Paiute recognize themselves to be a single people, they are culturally heterogeneous. Subgroups are defined geographically and ecologically. The members of each Paiute community commonly refer to themselves and to members of other communities by the food that traditionally formed a staple of their diet. The variety of Northern Paiute that you will learn about here is spoken by the Koodzabe Duka'a (the brine fly pupae eaters of Mono Lake), the Wey Dukadu or Pogi Dukadu (the rye grass seed eaters of Bridgeport, CA), the Onabe Dukadu (the salt eaters of Coleville, CA), and the Pehabe Paa (the Paiute of Sweetwater, NV). These four communities are located around Mono Lake and to the north on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. The other two main varieties of Northern Paiute are spoken farther north in Nevada and in Oregon.
Northern Paiute is also closely related to the Mono language, spoken to the south of Mono Lake. More distantly, it is related to the language of the Shoshoni, who live in Death Valley, CA and to the east and north, as well as to that of the Kawaiisu and Ute, who reside in southern California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. The relations and history of these languages are areas of active research among linguists, archaeologists, and historians.
