Linguistic Natural Selection

The evolution of San Diegos language

Walk around San Diego and you will see a sunny city situated in the coastal desert
region; it is currently home to nearly one and a half million people. Walking around todays San
Diego, the first and most common language you will notice those one and a half million people
using is English. You will hear people using it to speak with their friends, families, and
coworkers; you will see it on billboards and advertisements; and you will read it on signs and in
local newspapers. According to Languages Fill the Melting Pot, a Union Tribune article
written by Leslie Berestein, Spanish is second to English in San Diego and approximately
661,000 San Diegans speak it at home today. Thats nearly half of all San Diegos residents.
Today, you will hear Spanish spoken in public while walking around in San Diego, though not as
commonly as English. You will also see it written on some signs, though its almost always
underneath an English translation. You might also hear some of the less prominent, yet still
present languages of twenty-first-century San Diego, such as Tagalog, Chinese, Vietnamese, or
Korean.
It is difficult for some people, especially those who, like me, dont regularly speak
another language in their everyday life, to imagine a San Diego without English or Spanish or
the other languages that have become so familiar to todays residents. If people such as myself
are not frequently exposed to a large variety of languages, its easy to forget that English isnt the
only language here. However, English, easily the most used language in modern San Diego, is
relatively new to the San Diego area; its been here for barely more than two centuries. Spanish
has been here a little longer, but not by much.
The truth is that a variety of languages, not just the ones we see and hear today, have
made their way to San Diego throughout history. Some have risen to prominence, both in the city
and in the world, while others have plummeted to extinction, or very close to it.
To gain an understanding of the languages that San Diego has been home to over time, I
started at the beginning. I searched for the very first people known to reside in what would
become the city we know today. This brought me to a timeline on the San Diego History
Centers website that gives an overview of the major events that have occurred in San Diego as
far back as historical studies can tell us, including the arrival of different cultural groups in San
Diego.
The first people to inhabit the land that is now San Diego migrated as hunting people
from Northeast Asia. They travelled along the Bering Strait, then went down the West Coast of
North America, and finally arrived in San Diego approximately 20,000 years ago. With these
first occupants came the first languages to be spoken in San Diego.
The earliest language known to be used in San Diego is Yuman, also known as Quechan,
which was spoken by a group living in what is today known as La Jolla about twenty-one
centuries ago in 1000 BCE. To gain more information on Yuman (as well as the other Native

American languages spoken in San Diego), I consulted a website called Native Languages of
the Americas. The website, run by a linguist and a linguistic preservationist, is dedicated to the
continuation and survival of Native American languages through education. It writes about
several different languages that were and still are spoken by the indigenous people of North and
South America and the groups and tribes that they come from. Through this website I learned
that Yuman is not commonly spoken in the present-day; only about three hundred people, most
of them elders, still speak it.
Around the same time that Yuman was being spoken in La Jolla, other tribes called
Diegueo and Kamia were living in central and eastern San Diego. The Diegueo and Kamia,
more commonly known as the Kumeyaay, spoke the Kumeyaay language. Like Yuman,
Kumeyaay has lost much of its prominence as a language and is only spoken by a couple
hundred people in southern California and Mexico.
By the eleventh century, the Kumeyaay had moved and were living in what is now
Mission Valley, San Diego River Valley, and Ensenada. Yuman groups had since relocated to
northern San Diego, along with a group of Shoshoneans. The Shoshoneans spoke the language
Shoshoni, or Shoshone. Shoshoni speakers are more common and the language is less
endangered than Kumeyaay or Yuman; there are more than a thousand speakers and it is being
taught to children, meaning it is not likely to go extinct any time soon.
There were also three additional cultural groups (and languages) in the San Diego area at
this time. Using a map on display at the Museum of Man in Balboa Park, I was able to find
where in the San Diego area these three tribes were living. The Luiseo lived in todays North
County and spoke Luiseo, a language now nearly extinct and only spoken by a few dozen
elders. The Cupeo inhabited land near Warner Springs and spoke Cupeo, a language, like
Luiseo, that today has only a few dozen elder speakers. The Cahuilla lived east of Mount
Palomar and spoke Cahuilla. Cahuilla is another language close to extinction and has even less
speakers than Luiseo or Cupeo, most of them also elders.
It was not until the sixteenth century that the first speakers of a European language
arrived in San Diego, beginning with the Spaniard Juan Cabrillo arriving in Point Loma by boat
in 1542. The arrival of Cabrillo also marked the arrival of the Spanish language in San Diego.
Spanish spread in San Diego as more speakers arrived in the newly conquered land and Spanish
missions were established. Since its introduction to San Diego and the rest of the Americas,
Spanish has evolved into a different dialect; it arrived in the form of the European dialect of
Spain and has since developed into the Hispanic dialect that inhabits San Diego and many other
parts of the Americas today. Spanish remains a prominent language in San Diego and its culture
to this day, with nearly half of its population using it on a regular basis.
After Spanish came to San Diego, other languages from Europe and Asia began arriving
in the area over the next couple of centuries. Russians began colonizing the northwest coast in
1768, but their language has not had a profound effect on San Diego or its history. French ships
arrived in San Diego in 1786.

The English language, now the most prominent, commonly spoken language in San
Diego, arrived with the British by boat in 1793 as well as from the United States in 1800, also by
boat. English spread in San Diego and the rest of the west coast as routes were established to the
area from the other side of the United States, beginning with Jedidiah Smiths route from Salt
Lake City in 1826, which made it much easier for people from the U.S. to travel to San Diego.
More Americans began moving and migrating to San Diego in the 1840s, sparked by the Gold
Rush, which brought many to the west coast in the hopes of finding gold. San Diego was made a
part of the United States when California was made a state; many of its residents were
English-speakers by this time.
There was also a population of people who spoke Chinese who, by 1875, were prominent
enough to establish Chinatown in the San Diego area. The Vietnamese language also came to
San Diego much more recently, when refugees from Vietnam were being housed in San Diego
beginning in 1975.
So while youre walking and looking around the San Diego of 2014, keep in mind that
the words and languages you hear are not, never have been, and never will be set into this place
forever. Languages travel with people and with cultures. In addition, they go through their own
forms of evolution and natural selection. Some languages spread and grow while others are
pushed aside and left to shrink into near obsolescence.