Northern Paiute ,

endonym An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, ...

Numu, also known as Paviotso, is a Western

Numic Numic is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It includes seven languages spoken by Native American peoples traditionally living in the Great Basin, Colorado River basin, Snake River basin, and southern Great Plains. The word Numic com ...

language of the Uto-Aztecan family, which according to

Marianne Mithun Marianne Mithun (born 1946) is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position since 19 ...

had around 500 fluent speakers in 1994. ''

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensiv ...

'' reported the number of speakers in 1999 as 1,631. It is closely related to the Mono language.

Phonology

Northern Paiute's phonology is highly variable, and its phonemes have many allophones.

Consonants

Vowels

Language revitalization

In 2005, the Northwest Indian Language Institute of the

University of Oregon The University of Oregon (UO, U of O or Oregon) is a public research university in Eugene, Oregon. Founded in 1876, the institution is well known for its strong ties to the sports apparel and marketing firm Nike, Inc, and its co-founder, billion ...

formed a partnership to teach Northern Paiute and

Kiksht Upper Chinook, endonym Kiksht, also known as Columbia Chinook, and Wasco-Wishram after its last surviving dialect, is a recently extinct language of the US Pacific Northwest. It had 69 speakers in 1990, of whom 7 were monolingual: five Wasco and ...

in the

Warm Springs Indian Reservation The Warm Springs Indian Reservation consists of in north-central Oregon, in the United States, and is governed by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. Tribes Three tribes form the confederation: the Wasco, Tenino (Warm Springs) and P ...

schools. In 2013,

Washoe County, Nevada Washoe County () is a county in the U.S. state of Nevada. As of the 2020 census, the population was 486,492, making it Nevada's second-most populous county. Its county seat is Reno. Washoe County is included in the Reno, NV Metropolitan Statist ...

became the first school district in Nevada to offer Northern Paiute classes, offering an elective course in the language at Spanish Springs High School. Classes have also been taught at Reed High School in

Sparks, Nevada Sparks is a city in Washoe County, Nevada, United States. It was founded in 1904, incorporated on March 15, 1905, and is located just east of Reno. The 2020 U.S. Census counted 108,445 residents in the city. It is the fifth most populous city in ...

. Elder Ralph Burns of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation worked with

University of Nevada, Reno The University of Nevada, Reno (Nevada, the University of Nevada, or UNR) is a public land-grant research university in Reno, Nevada. It is the state's flagship public university and primary land grant institution. It was founded on October 12, ...

linguist Catherine Fowler to help develop a spelling system. The alphabet uses 19 letters. They have also developed a language-learning book, “Numa Yadooape,” and a series of computer disks of language lessons.

Morphology

Northern Paiute is an

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative langu ...

language, in which words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

s strung together.

References

Bibliography

*Liljeblad, Sven, Catherine S. Fowler, & Glenda Powell. 2012. ''The Northern Paiute-Bannock Dictionary, with an English-Northern Paiute-Bannock Finder List and a Northern Paiute-Bannock-English Finder List''. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. *Mithun, Marianne (1999). ''Languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. *Snapp, Allen, John L. Anderson, and Joy Anderson. 1982
Northern Paiute
In Ronald W. Langacker, eds. Sketches in Uto-Aztecan grammar, III: Uto-Aztecan grammatical sketches. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics, 57(3) he publication erroneously stated (56)3, but this has been amended in the PDF made available online by the publisher.pp. 1–92. *Thornes, Tim (2003). "A Northern Paiute Grammar with Texts". Ph.D. dissertation. University of Oregon-Eugene.

External links

Northern Paiute
page, with sound sample
Northern Paiute language
overview at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
Northern Paiute Indian Language (Paviotso, Bannock)Northern Paiute resources at the Open Language Archives Community Northern Paiute Language Project
University of California, Santa Cruz
World Atlas of Language Structures: Northern PaiuteOLAC resources in and about the Northern Paiute language
Agglutinative languages Paiute Numic languages Indigenous languages of Idaho Indigenous languages of California Indigenous languages of Oregon Indigenous languages of Nevada Indigenous languages of the Southwestern United States Indigenous languages of the North American Southwest Indigenous languages of the North American Great Basin Native American language revitalization {{indigenousAmerican-lang-stub