Northern Yukian

The traditional Northern Yukian language area ranges from the Coast Range bordering the Sacramento Valley to Fort Bragg on the coast. It has three distinct dialects: Yuki, spoken in the upper drainage of the Middle Fork of the Eel River; Huchnom, spoken on the lower Eel River; and Coast Yuki, spoken on the Pacific coast between Fort Bragg and Usal Creek. In pre-contact times, there were approximately 6,880 speakers of Yuki, 2,100 of Huchnom, and 750 of Coast Yuki (Cook 1956). In the 21st century, there are no first-language speakers (Golla 2011).

Map of the Yuki and Huchnom varieties of Northern Yukian
Map of the Yuki and Huchnom varieties of Northern Yukian (Martin A. Baumhoff. 1958. California Athabascan Groups. University of California Anthropological Records 16:157-237.)

Northern Yukian (also called “Yuki”) is a Yukian language; the other member of this family is Wappo.

Selected archival materials at Berkeley

Selected materials in other archives

Further reading

  • Balodis, Uldis. 2016. Yuki Grammar. University of California Press. [PDF - may not be publicly available]
  • Foster, George. 1944. A summary of Yuki culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Golla, Victor. 2011. California Indian languages. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Kroeber, A. L. 1932. Yuki Myths. Anthropos, 27:905-939. [PDF]
  • Sawyer, Jesse O. and Alice Schlichter. 1984. Yuki vocabulary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Schlichter, Alice. 1978. English-Yuki vocabulary. M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley.
  • Schlichter, Alice. 1985. The Yukian language family. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. [PDF]