Colorado River Numic language

Colorado River
Southern Paiute
Native to United States
Region Nevada, California, Utah, Arizona, Colorado
Ethnicity 6,200 Chemehuevi, Southern Paiute and Ute (2007)[1]
Native speakers
920 (2007)[1]
20 monolinguals (1990 census)[1]
Uto-Aztecan
  • Numic

    • Southern Numic
      • Colorado River
Dialects
  • Chemehuevi
  • Southern Paiute
  • Ute
Language codes
ISO 639-3 ute
Glottolog utes1238[2]

Colorado River Numic (also called Ute /ˈjuːt/, Southern Paiute /ˈpjuːt/, Ute–Southern Paiute, or Ute-Chemehuevi /ɛmˈwvi/), of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family, is a dialect chain that stretches from southeastern California to Colorado.[3] Individual dialects are Chemehuevi, which is in danger of extinction, Southern Paiute (Moapa, Cedar City, Kaibab, and San Juan subdialects), and Ute (Central Utah, Northern, White Mesa, Southern subdialects). According to the Ethnologue, there were a little less than two thousand speakers of Colorado River Numic Language in 1990, or ca. 40% out of an ethnic population of 5,000.[4]

The Southern Paiute dialect has played a significant role in linguistics, as the background for a famous article by linguist Edward Sapir and his collaborator Tony Tillohash on the nature of the phoneme.[5]

Morphology

The Colorado River Numic language is an agglutinative language, in which words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several morphemes strung together.

Dialects

The three major dialect groups of Colorado River are Chemehuevi, Southern Paiute, and Ute, although there are no strong isoglosses. The threefold division is primarily one of culture rather than strictly linguistic. There are, however, three major phonological distinctions among the dialects:

  • In Southern Paiute and Ute, initial /h/ has been lost: Chemehuevi /hipi/ 'drink', other dialects /ipi/ 'drink'.
  • In Ute, nasal-stop clusters have become voiceless geminate stops: Ute /pukku/ 'horse, pet', other dialects /puŋku/.
  • In Ute, the mid back round vowel /o/ has been fronted to /ö/: Ute /söö-/ 'lungs', other dialects /soo-/.

There are no strong isoglosses between Southern Paiute and Ute for the changes but an increasing level of change, as one moves from Kaibab Southern Paiute (0% of nasal-stop clusters have changed) to Southern Ute (100% of nasal-stop clusters have changed).

References

  1. 1 2 3 Colorado River at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Ute-Southern Paiute". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. Mithun (1999:542)
  4. "Ethnologue report for language code:ute". Ethnologue. Retrieved 2009-06-13.
  5. Sapir, Edward (1933). "La réalité psychologique des phonèmes (The psychological reality of phonemes)". Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique (in French).

External links

Bibliography

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