Ethnicity Karkin people ISO 639-3 krb | Extinct 19th century Glottolog kark1259 | |
Native to United States (California) Language family Yok-Utian
Utian
Costanoan
Karkin | ||
The Karkin language (also called Los Carquines in Spanish) is one of eight Ohlone languages. It was extinct by the 1950s and was formerly spoken in north central California.
Karkin is an Ohlone/Costanoan language, in the Utian language family, which is a Yok-Utian language, in the Penutian language family.
It was historically spoken by the Karkin people, who lived in the Carquinez Strait region in the northeast portion of the San Francisco Bay estuary. Its only documentation is a single vocabulary obtained by linguist-missionary Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta at Mission Dolores in 1821. Although meager, the records of Karkin show that it constituted a distinct branch of Costanoan, strikingly different from the neighboring Chochenyo Ohlone language and other Ohlone languages spoken farther south. Karkin has probably not been spoken since the 19th century.
All Costanoan languages became extinct, but some are being studied and revived.