Kashaya (also Southwestern Pomo, Kashia) is the critically endangered language of the Kashia band of the Pomo people. The Pomoan languages have been classified as part of the Hokan language family (although the status of Hokan itself is controversial). The name Kashaya corresponds to words in neighboring languages with meanings such as "skillful" and "expert gambler". It is spoken by the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of the Stewarts Point Rancheria. Phonology Vowels Kashaya has five vowels, which all occur as short and long. In the orthography established by Robert Oswalt, long vowels are represented by a raised dot (ꞏ). Vowel length is contrastive in pairs such as "bone" versus "wind", and "hill, mountain" versus "uphill". Consonants Kashaya has the consonants shown in the chart below, following the transcription style established by Oswalt (1961). The letter c represents the affricate , which patterns phonologically as a palatal stop. The coronal stops differ not so much in the location of the contact against the top of the mouth as in the configuration of the tongue. The dental stop t is described by Oswalt (1961) as post-dental among older speakers but as interdental among younger speakers more heavily influenced by English, similar to the place of articulation of . This dental stop has a laminal articulation perhaps best transcribed in IPA as . The alveolar stop ṭ is an apical articulation, more precisely . For younger speakers it resembles the English t in position. This chart treats aspirated and glottalized sonorants as single segments; Oswalt analyzes them as sequences of a sonorant plus or , from which they often derive. The consonants occur only in loanwords; due to the influence of English, loans from Spanish and Russian receive a pronunciation of like that in American English. The voiced stops are the realization of in onset position. Syllable structure In the normal case, every syllable requires a single onset consonant; no onset clusters are permitted. In most contexts, the rhyme consists of a vowel that may be long or followed by a single consonant in the coda, resulting in the possible syllables CV, CV꞉, and CVC. Examples of these structures are "coyote", "is running (non-final)", and "to bow". A few loanwords do have an onset cluster, such as "bridle" and "stove" (from Spanish , ). Loans may also have superheavy CV꞉C syllables, since stressed vowels in the source language are typically borrowed with