Yokuts language

Yokuts is not a single language but a group of half a dozen primary dialects, with an estimated forty linguistically distinct communities existing before Euro-American contact; Glottolog divides the group into four languages, Palewyami, Buena Vista, Northern Yokuts and Tule-Kaweah Yokuts. It was spoken in the interior of Northern and Central California in and around the San Joaquin Valley. All of its constituent dialects apart from Valley Yokuts are now extinct, and Valley Yokuts itself survives with only a handful of fluent and partial speakers across subdialects such as Chukchansi and Yawelmani, with about 50 speakers including semispeakers recorded in 2007. Yokuts has been placed within the proposed Penutian stock, with stronger evidence supporting a narrower Yok-Utian grouping alongside the Utian languages, though these wider relationships remain debated among specialists.