Kitanemuk language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kitanemuk
Spoken in: United States 
Region: Southern California
Language extinction: Last spoken in the 1940s by Marcelino Rivera, Isabella Gonzales, and Refugia Duran
Language family: Uto-Aztecan
 Takic
  Serran
   Kitanemuk
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: nai
ISO 639-3: none
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Kitanemuk was a Northern Uto-Aztecan language of the Takic branch. It was very closely related to Serrano, and may have been a dialect of Serrano. The last speakers lived some time in the 1940s, though the last fieldwork was carried out in 1937. J. P. Harrington took copious notes in the 1916 and 1917, however, which has allowed for a fairly detailed knowledge of the language.

Contents

[edit] Phonology

[edit] Consonants

The consonant phonemes of Kitanemuk, as reconstructed by Anderton (1988) based on Harrington's field notes, were (with some standard Americanist phonetic notation in <angle brackets>:

Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
plain labio.
Nasal /m/ /n/ /ŋ/
Plosive /p/ /t/ /k/ /kʷ/ /ʔ/
Affricate /ts/ <c> /tʃ/ <č>
Fricative /v/ /s/ /ʃ/ <š> /h/
Rhotic /r/
Approximant /l /j/ <y> /w/

Word-finally, /h/ becomes [r], and all voiced consonants become voiceless before other voiceless consonants or word-finally.

[edit] Vowels

Front Central Back
Close i ɨ u
Mid e o
Open a

[edit] Grammar

 Please help improve this section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion.


[edit] References

  • Anderton, Alice J. (1988). The Language of the Kitanemuks of California. PhD. diss., University of California, Los Angeles.
  • Mithun, Marianne (1999). The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[edit] External links