Washo is a severely moribund language spoken by fewer than 15 elderly speakers in an area around Lake Tahoe, California and Nevada. Washo belongs to the Great Basin culture area and is the only non-Numic group of that area. Some scholars classified the language as part of the Hokan stock (Dixon & Kroeber, 1919; Harrington, 1917; Sapir, 1917, 1921), while others consider it a linguistic isolate (Campbell & Mithun, 1979).

The name, Washo, also spelled Washoe, is an Anglicized version of the ethnonym, [wá:šiw].

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