Southern Sierra Miwok language

Southern Sierra Miwok
Yosemite
Spoken in	California, western slopes of Sierra Nevada
Ethnicity	Valley and Sierra Miwok
Native speakers	7  (1994)
Language family	Yok-Utian Utian Miwok Eastern Sierra Miwok Southern Sierra Miwok
Language codes
ISO 639-3	skd
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Southern Sierra Miwok is a Utian language spoken by the Native American people called the Southern Sierra Miwok of Northern California.

Contents 1 Sounds 1.1 Consonants 1.2 Vowels 1.3 Length 1.4 Syllable 2 Documentary history 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

Sounds

Consonants

The 15 consonants of Southern Sierra Miwok:

	Bilabial	Dental	Alveolar	Post- alveolar	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m		n		ŋ
Stop	p	t̪	t	tʃ	k	ʔ
Fricative			s	ʃ		h
Approximant			l	j	w

Vowels

The 6 vowels of Southern Sierra Miwok:

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i	ɨ	u
Mid	ɛ		ɔ
Open		a

Length

Since vowel and consonant length is contrastive, length (represented as /ː/ is considered to be a separate (archi-)phoneme.)

Syllable

The syllable structure of Southern Sierra Miwok is the following:

CV(ː)(C)

Documentary history

Field recordings of Southern Sierra Miwok were made in the 1950s by linguist Sylvia M. Broadbent, and several speakers, especially Chris Brown, Castro Johnson, and Alice Wilson.^[1]

See also

• Miwok
• Valley and Sierra Miwok
• Penutian

References

• Broadbent, Sylvia (1964), "The Southern Sierra Miwok Language", University of California publications in linguistics (Berkeley: University of California Press) 38 
• Callaghan, Catherine (2001), "More evidence for Yok-Utian: A reanalysis of the Dixon and Kroeber sets", International Journal of American Linguistics 67 (3): 313–346, doi:10.1086/466461 
• Mithun, Marianne (1999), The languages of Native North America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-23228-7 

Sloan, Kelly Dawn (1991), Syllables and Templates: Evidence from Southern Sierra Miwok. Cambridge, MA. MIT Doctoral Dissertation

External links

• Ethnologue: Utian
• Online books about the Southern Sierra Miwok
• Origin of the word Yosemite (and linked references)
• Southern Sierra Miwok Dictionary
• Native Tribes, Groups, Language Families and Dialects of California in 1770 (map after Kroeber)
• Southern Sierra Miwok language overview at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages

Miwok indigenous peoples of California Distinct ethnic groups Plains and Sierra Coast Lake Bay Regions inhabited Sierra Nevada / Central Valley Marin County / Sonoma County Lake County / Contra Costa County Culture Mythology Plains and Sierra Narratives Coast Narratives Lake Narratives Utian languages Kuksu religion Hunting and gathering