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Richard Applegate, Ph.D.
 

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Coast Miwok Language Tutorial
 
 

These links all work, but the dictionary and text pages are currently empty.



This tutorial provides you with the resources you need to learn Coast Miwok. It's meant for people without formal training in linguistics, so you'll encounter a minimum of technical linguistic terms — although some linguistic terms show up when they make it easier to talk about some aspect of the language. You see that any technical term you might not know is linked to a glossary page, so you can look it up with a single click (and then use the Back button to return to your place).

The heart of this tutorial is a series of lessons that guide you step by step through learning Coast Miwok on your own schedule.

New: You can hear Coast Miwok words pronounced in the Pronunciation Guide and on the Phrases page of Phrases and Word Lists.

New: The Vocabulary Illustrated pages have graphics that illustrate some Coast Miwok words. They will soon have sound clips so that you can click on the image and hear the word pronounced.

Coast Miwok — Marin Miwok and Bodega Miwok

The current version of these pages presents Bodega Miwok, which is either a dialect of Marin Miwok or else perhaps a very closely related language. There are some differences between the two.

The documentation for Bodega Miwok is more reliable and extensive. I have built these pages around a dictionary of Bodega Miwok by Dr. Catherine Callaghan, based on her extensive consultation with Mrs. Ballard in the 1960s, plus my own notes and recordings of consultations with Mrs. Ballard in 1974. Dr. Callaghan has graciously offered her expertise to fill in gaps in my knowledge of Bodega Miwok.

I have supplemented the Bodega material with some material on Marin Miwok, primarily Dr. Callaghan's manuscript dictionary of Marin Miwok and the extensive linguistic information in Interviews with Tom Smith and Maria Copa: Isabel Kelley's Ethnographic Notes on the Coast Miwok Indians of Marin and Southern Sonoma Counties, California, Miwok Archaeological Preserve of Marin Occasional Paper Number Six, 1996.

Richard Applegate, Ph.D.