Colorado River Numic language

Colorado River Numic (also called Ute /ˈjuːt/, Southern Paiute /ˈpaɪjuːt/, and Ute-Southern Paiute or Southern Paiute-Ute), of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family, is a dialect chain that stretches from southeastern California to Colorado.^[1] Individual dialects are Chemehuevi, which is in danger of extinction, Southern Paiute (of which San Juan and Kaibab are subdialects), and Ute (in northern and southern dialects). According to the Ethnologue, there were a little less than two thousand speakers of Colorado River in 1990, or ca. 40% out of an ethnic population of 5,000. ^[2]

The Southern Paiute dialect has had 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.^[3]

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.

References

External links

• A Preliminary Analysis of Southern Ute with a Special Focus on Noun Phrases - also contains phonology information
• Chemehuevi language overview at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
• A Chemehuevi Language Archive - 1970s Fieldwork and Analysis by Margaret L. Press

Bibliography

• Laird, Carobeth (1976). The Chemehuevis. Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press.
• Mithun, Marianne (1999). Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.