The Hokanlanguage family is a hypothetical grouping of a dozen small language families that were spoken mainly in California, Arizona and Baja California. In the first half-century after the "Hokan hypothesis" was first proposed by Roland B. Dixon and Alfred L. Kroeber, and further elaborated by Edward Sapir, little additional evidence was found that these families were related to each other. But since about 1950, increased efforts to document Hokan languages and to establish sound correspondences in proposed lexical resemblance sets have added weight to the Hokan hypothesis, leading to its acceptance by many specialists in the languages of California, Oregon, and Meso-America, although some skepticism remains among scholars. The name Hokan is loosely based on the word for "two" in the various Hokan languages: *xwak in Proto-Yuman, c-oocj in Seri, ha'k in Achumawi, etc. Geographic distribution of the Hokan languages suggests that they became separated around the great central valley of California by the influx of later-arriving Penutian and other peoples; archaeological evidence for this is summarized in Chase-Dunn & Mann. These languages are spoken by Native American communities around and east of Mount Shasta, others near Lake Tahoe, the Pomo on the California coast, and the Yuman peoples along the lower Colorado River. Some linguists also include Chumash, between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and other families, but the evidence is insubstantial, and most now restrict Hokan to some or all of the languages listed below. The Yurumanguí language of Colombia was claimed to be Hokan by Rivet. This claim has not been accepted by historical linguists. Terrence Kaufman wondered if Hokan might be related to Oto-Mangean.
Languages
The Hokan languages retained by Kaufman due to regular sound correspondences and common core vocabulary are as follows. Apart from Shasta–Palaihnihan and Yuman, all branches are single languages or shallow families.
Marlett reevaluated the evidence and concluded that the evidence for Seri and Salinan has not been systematically or convincingly presented. The inclusion of the Tequistlatecan languages has also not received much support. The Chumash languages were once included, but that position has been almost universally abandoned. Recently, Jolkesky presented lexical evidence, such as pronouns, body part terms and kinship terms, which may point to the inclusion of the Lencan and Misumalpan language families in the Hokan stock or, alternatively, that they formed a Sprachbund with some Hokan languages long before a spreading along the Pacific Coast. Jolkesky also notes lexical betweens between Hokan and the Misumalpan and Lencan families.
