Yurok Language Project

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The Yurok Language

Klamath River mouth, looking south

The Yurok language is spoken in northwestern California, as it has been spoken for centuries, along the Klamath River from Wechpus (Weitchpec) to Rek'woy (Requa) and south along the Pacific coast to Churey (Trinidad). Neighboring languages include Tolowa (north along the coast), Wiyot (south along the coast), Chilula (in the hills south of the Klamath), Hupa (along the Trinity River, which meets the Klamath at Wechpus), and Karok (upriver along the Klamath; "Yurok" itself is a Karok word for "downriver"). At the time of white contact in the nineteenth century, the Yurok language had several thousand speakers; today there are about a dozen fluent native speakers, all elderly, and an active language revitalization program.

Yurok is distantly related to its neighbor Wiyot, and to languages belonging to the Algonquian language family spoken across central and eastern North America; the Algonquian languages include Blackfoot, Cree, Ojibwe, and many others. Linguists believe that all these languages descend from a single common ancestor spoken thousands of years ago, perhaps somewhere in present-day eastern Washington or Oregon or northern Idaho. The relations and history of these languages are areas of active research among linguists, archaeologists, and historians.