The Washoe or Waší:šiw are a Great Basin tribe of Native Americans, living near Lake Tahoe at the border between California and Nevada. Many Washoe people today are enrolled in the Washoe Tribe of Nevada & California, though some are enrolled in the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony and the Susanville Indian Rancheria. The Washoe language is a linguistic isolate.
Washo or Washoe (/ˈwɒ.ʃoʊ/; endonym wá꞉šiw ʔítlu) is an endangered Native American language isolate spoken by the Washo on the California–Nevada border in the drainages of the Truckee and Carson Rivers, especially around Lake Tahoe. While there were only 20 elderly native speakers of Washo as of 2011, since 1994 there had been a small immersion school that has produced a number of moderately fluent younger speakers. The immersion school has since closed its doors and the language program operates through the Cultural Resource Department for the Washoe Tribe. The language remains very endangered; however, there has been a renaissance in the language revitalization movement as many of the students who attended the original immersion school have become teachers.
Ethnographic Washo speakers belonged to the Great Basin culture area and they were the only non-Numic group of that area. The language has borrowed from the neighboring Uto-Aztecan, Maiduan and Miwokan languages and is connected to both the Great Basin and Northern California sprachbunds.