Luiseño language

Luiseño
Cham'teela
Native to United States
Region Southern California
Ethnicity 2,500 Luiseño and Juaneño (2007)[1]
Native speakers
5 (2007)[1]
Uto-Aztecan
  • Northern Uto-Aztecan

    • Takic
      • Cupan
        • Luiseño
Dialects
  • Luiseño
  • Juaneño
Language codes
ISO 639-2 lui
ISO 639-3 lui
Glottolog luis1253[2]

The Luiseño language is an Uto-Aztecan language of California spoken by the Luiseño, a Native American people who at the time of the first contacts with the Spanish in the 16th century inhabited the coastal area of southern California, ranging 50 miles (80 km) from the southern part of Los Angeles County, California, to the northern part of San Diego County, California, and inland 30 miles (48 km). The people are called "Luiseño" due to their proximity to the Mission San Luis Rey de Francia.

The language is highly endangered, but an active language revitalization project is underway,[3] assisted by linguists from the University of California, Riverside.[4] The Pechanga Indian Reservation offers classes for children, and in 2013, "the tribe .. began funding a graduate-level Cal State San Bernardino Luiseño class, one of the few for-credit university indigenous-language courses in the country."[5]

As of 2012, a Luiseño video game for the Nintendo DS is being used to teach the language to young people.[6][7]

The dialect spoken by the Juaneño people is extinct.

Morphology

Luiseño is an agglutinative language, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several morphemes strung together.

Phonology

Vowels

Luiseño has five vowel phonemes.

Front Central Back
Close i   u
Mid e   o
Open   a  

Variants

For some native speakers recorded in The Sparkman Grammar of Luiseño, the allophones [ə] and [ɨ] are free variants of [e] and [i] respectively. However, other speakers do not use these variants. Sparkman records fewer than 25 Luiseño words with either [ə] or [ɨ]. For one of these words (ixíla “a cough”) the pronunciations [əxɨla] and [ɨxɨla] are both recorded.

Unstressed [u] freely varies with [o]. Likewise, unstressed [i] and [e] are free variants.

Vowel syncope

Vowels are often syncopated when attaching certain affixes, notably the possessive prefixes no- “my”, cham- “our”, etc. Hence polóv “good”, but o-plovi “your goodness”; kichum “houses” (nominative case), but kichmi “houses” (accusative case).

Vowel length

Luiseño distinguishes vowel length quantitatively. Luiseño vowels have three lengths.

Overlong vowels are rare in Luiseño, typically reserved for absolutes, such as interjections, e.g. aaashisha, roughly “haha!” (more accurately an exclamation of praise, joy or laughter).

Accent

A stress accent regularly falls on the first syllable of a word. In Luiseño, stress is fixed and is not contrastive.

Many orthographies mark irregular stress with an acute accent on the stressed syllable’s vowel, e.g. chilúy “speak Spanish”. In these systems, irregularly stressed long vowels either carry a written accent on both vowels or the first vowel only, e.g. koyóówut or koyóowut “whale”. Also, stress is not visually represented when it falls on the first syllable, e.g. hiicha “what”.

Another convention is to mark stress by underlining accented vowels, e.g. koyoowut “whale”.

As a rule, the possessive prefixes are unstressed. The accent remains on the first syllable of the root word, e.g. nokaamay “my son” and never *nokaamay. One rare exception is the word -ha “alone” (< po- “his/her/its” + ha “self”), whose invariable prefix and fixed accent suggests that it is now considered a single lexical item (compare noha “myself”, poha “him/herself”, etc.).

Consonants

Luiseño has a fairly rich consonant inventory.

Luiseño consonant phonemes
Labial Dental Alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal
Nasal m [m] n [n] ng [ŋ]
Stop voiceless p [p] t [t] ch [tʃ] k [k] q [q] ' [ʔ]
voiced b [b] d [d] g (ɡ)
Fricative voiceless f [f] s [s̪] z [s̺] sh [ʃ] x [χ] h [h]
voiced v [v] th [ð]
Approximant l [l] y [j] w [w]
Trill r [ɾ] g [ʀ]

Orthography

Spelling systems

Along with an extensive oral tradition, Luiseño has a written tradition that stretches back to the Spanish settlement of San Diego. Pablo Tac (1822–1841), a native Luiseño speaker and a convert to Roman Catholicism, was the first to develop an orthography for his native language. His orthography leaned heavily on Spanish, which he learned in his youth.

Although Luiseño has no standard orthography, a commonly accepted spelling is implemented in reservation classrooms and college campuses in San Diego where the language is taught. The various orthographies that have been used for writing the language show influences from Spanish, English and the IPA.

Notable Luiseño spelling correspondences
IPA Pablo Tac (1830s) Sparkman (1900) Modern
(Long vowel, e.g. /iː/) ii ii
/tʃ/ č ch
/ʃ/ š sh
/q/ q q
/ʔ/ ' ʔ '
/x/ j x x
/ð/   δ th / ð
/ŋ/ ŋ ng / ñ
/j/ y y y

Sample texts

The Lord's Prayer (or the Our Father) in Luiseño, as recorded in The Sparkman Grammar of Luiseño:

Cham-na’ tuupaña aaukat cham-cha oi ohó’vanma.
Toshño om chaami.
Loví’i om hish mimchapun ivá’ ooxñ tuupaña axáninuk.
Ovi om chaamik cham-naachaxoni choun teméti.
Maaxaxan-up om chaamik hish aláxwichi chaam-lo’xai ivianáninuk chaam-cha maaxaxma pomóomi chaami hish pom-lo’xai aláxwichi.
Tuusho kamíí’i chaami chaam-lo’xai hish hichakati.
Kwavcho om chaami.
Our-father / sky-in / being / we / you / believe / always.
Command / you / us.
Do / you / anything / whatever / here / earth-on / sky-in / as.
Give / you / us-to / our-food / every / day.
Pardon / you / us-to / anything / bad / our-doing / this as /we / pardon / them / us / anything / their-doing / bad.
Not / allow / us / our-doing / anything / wicked.
Care / you / us.

Linguistic documentation

Linguist John Peabody Harrington made a series of recordings of speakers of Luiseño in the 1930s. Those recordings, made on aluminum disks, were deposited in the United States National Archives.[8] They have since been digitized and made available over the internet by the Smithsonian Institution.[9]

See also

Sources

References

  1. 1 2 Luiseño at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Luiseno". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. "Preserving the Luiseno Indian Language: The California Report". The California Report, californiareport.org. Retrieved 8 May 2010.
  4. Olson, David (2013-02-15). "TRIBES: Campaign to save Native American languages". Press-Enterprise, PE.com. Retrieved 2013-02-23.
  5. Deborah Sullivan Brennan (2012-09-01). "Video games teach traditional tongue". North County Times. Escondido, California. Retrieved 2012-10-21.
  6. "Video Games Make Learning Fun". SpokenFirst, Falmouth Institute. Retrieved 2012-10-21.
  7. Glenn, James R. (1991), "The Sound Recordings of John P. Harrington: A Report on Their Disposition and State of Preservation", Anthropological Linguistics, Anthropological Linguistics, Vol. 33, No. 4, 33 (4): 357–366, ISSN 0003-5483, JSTOR 30028216.
  8. "Collections Search Center, Smithsonian Institution". collections.si.edu. Retrieved 8 May 2010.

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