Siuslaw

Siuslaw was a language of the central Oregon coast in the United States, spoken by the Siuslaw people and the Lower Umpqua, or Kuitsh, people. It had two dialects, Siuslaw proper and Lower Umpqua, and is generally treated as a language isolate, although it has sometimes been grouped within a proposed Coast Oregon Penutian family. Documentation of the language rests mainly on fieldwork conducted by the linguist Leo J. Frachtenberg in 1911 and later recordings made by Dell Hymes with surviving speakers in 1954; the language became extinct around 1960, and much of what is known about it survives only in fragmentary archival materials.