Siuslaw language
Siuslaw was the language of the Siuslaw people and Lower Umpqua people of Oregon. It is also known as Lower Umpqua; Upper Umpqua was an Athabaskan language. The Siuslaw language had two dialects: Siuslaw proper and Lower Umpqua.
Siuslaw is usually considered to belong to the Penutian phylum, and may form part of a Coast Oregon Penutian subgroup together with Alsea and the Coosan languages.Documentation
Published sources are by Leo J. Frachtenberg who collected data from a non-English-speaking native speaker of the Lower Umpqua dialect and her Alsean husband during three months of fieldwork in 1911, and by Dell Hymes who worked with four Siuslaw speakers in 1954.
Further archived documentation consists of a 12-page vocabulary by James Owen Dorsey, a wordlist of approximately 150 words taken by Melville Jacobs in 1935 in work with Lower Umpqua speaker Hank Johnson, an audio recording of Siuslaw speaker Spencer Scott from 1941, hundreds of pages of notes from John Peabody Harrington in 1942 based on interviews with several native speakers, and audio recordings of vocabulary by Morris Swadesh in 1953.
