UC Berkeley

Karuk is an isolate language of northern California with a rich history of academic and locally-based documentation for over 100 years and an active community of learners, teachers, and speakers today. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the language’s history, social contexts, and grammatical patterns through present-day language use and language reclamation. After an introduction to the language’s sociocultural and linguistic setting, we offer a grammatical profile of this polysynthetic, highly agglutinating language, whose phonological patterns cause extensive fusion at morpheme boundaries. Among other features of typological interest, we discuss the Karuk pitch-accent system, its elaborate system of directional suffixes, multiple pluractional categories, the absence of a copula, and pragmatically determined word order. We conclude with a history of documentation and revitalization work in the Karuk community.