Takelma was the language spoken by the Latgawa and Takelma people and Cow Creek band of Upper Umpqua. It was first extensively described by Edward Sapir in his graduate thesis, The Takelma Language of Southwestern Oregon. The last fluent speaker of Takelma, with whom Sapir worked while writing about the language, was Frances Johnson (Gwísgwashãn). A dictionary from English to Takelma is currently being created in the hopes it can be revived. Dialects Latgawa dialect, spoken in southwestern Oregon along the upper Rogue River Lowland (Takelma) dialect, spoken in southwestern Oregon in the Rogue Valley There was possibly a Cow Creek dialect spoken in southwestern Oregon along the South Umpqua River, Myrtle Creek, and Cow Creek. Genealogical relations Takelma is commonly included in the controversial Penutian macro-family, as first suggested by Edward Sapir. Within Penutian, Takelma has been grouped together with the Kalapuyan languages in a "Takelma–Kalapuyan" or "Takelman" language family. However, an unpublished paper by Tarpent & Kendall (1998) finds this relationship to be unfounded because of the extremely different morphological structures of Takelma and Kalapuyan. DeLancey follows this position. Phonology Consonants The consonant phonemes as described by Sapir are: Vowels The vowel system of the Takelma language comprises the six vowels /a e i o u ʉ/, as well as their lengthened counterparts /aː eː iː oː uː ʉː/. Tones Three tones are noted as /v́/, /v̀/, and /v/. Grammar Takelma, like many Native American languages, is polysynthetic meaning that one can link together many different morphemes to form a word. Therefore one single word can often contain a lot of information that in English would be portrayed in a full sentence. This is mainly done by adding affixes to verbs. Tense Takelma has 6 different tenses listed below with the first (aorist) being the basic tense which is equivalent to the immediate future, present, and past. Aorist Potential Future Inferential Present Imperative Future Imperative Person and possession In Takelma, possession is marked by a set of affixes. Most of them are suffixes but there is one prefix. Below is a table of the four declensional sets. Set I is only ever used with terms of kinship. For example: Set II is used with bare stems or stems having the formant. For example: Alternations between –t and –tʰ in set II and set IV is regular and predictable. Set III is used with stems having other formants. For