Tiipay (Tipay) is a Native American language spoken by a number of

Kumeyaay The Kumeyaay, also known as Tipai-Ipai or by their historical Spanish name Diegueño, is a tribe of Indigenous peoples of the Americas who live at the northern border of Baja California in Mexico and the southern border of California in the Unit ...

(Kumiay) tribes in northern

Baja California Baja California (; 'Lower California'), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Baja California ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Baja California), is a state in Mexico. It is the northernmost and westernmost of the 32 federal entities of Mex ...

and southern

San Diego County San Diego County (), officially the County of San Diego, is a county in the southwestern corner of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 3,298,634, making it California's second-most populous county and the fi ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. It is also known as Southern Diegueño. Hinton (1994:28) provided a "conservative estimate" of 200 Tipai speakers in the early 1990s; the number of speakers has declined steadily since that time. Tipai belongs to the Yuman language family and to the Delta–California branch of that family. In the past, Tipai and its neighbors to the north,

and

Ipai The Kumeyaay, also known as Tipai-Ipai or by their historical Spanish name Diegueño, is a tribe of Indigenous peoples of the Americas who live at the northern border of Baja California in Mexico and the southern border of California in the Unit ...

, have been considered dialects of a single

Diegueño The Kumeyaay, also known as Tipai-Ipai or by their historical Spanish name Diegueño, is a tribe of Indigenous peoples of the Americas who live at the northern border of Baja California in Mexico and the southern border of California in the Unit ...

language, but linguists now recognize that they represent at least three distinct languages (for discussion, see Langdon 1990). Tipai itself is not a uniform speech variety, and some suggest that it might be possible to recognize multiple languages within Tipai ( Laylander 1985:33; Mithun 1999:577). Published documentation of the Tipai language includes a descriptive grammar (Miller 2001), a comparative dictionary (Miller and Langdon 2008), a word list (Meza and Meyer 2008), and texts (Hinton 1976, Hinton 1978, see also Miller 2001:331-348).

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

References

* Hinton, Leanne. 1976. The Tar Baby Story. In ''Yuman Texts'', edited by Langdon, Margaret. International Journal of American Linguistics Native American Texts Series 1.3:101-106. * Hinton, Leanne. 1978. Coyote Baptizes the Chickens. In ''Coyote Stories'', edited by Bright, William. International Journal of American Linguistics Native American Texts Series monograph 1:117-120. * Hinton, Leanne. 1994. ''Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages''. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books. * Langdon, Margaret. 1990. "Diegueño: How Many Languages?" In ''Proceedings of the 1990 Hokan-Penutian Languages Workshop'', edited by Redden, James E. pp. 184–190. University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale, IL. * Laylander, Don. 1985. "Some Linguistic Approaches to Southern California's Prehistory

''San Diego State University Cultural Resource Management Casual Papers'' 2(1):14-58. * Meza Cuero, Jon and Meyer, Paula. 2008. ''Tipai Language-English-Spanish Word List''. San Diego, CA: San Diego Unified School District. * Miller, Amy. 2001. ''A Grammar of Jamul Tiipay''. Mouton Grammar Library 23. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. * Miller, Amy and Langdon, Margaret. 2008. ''Barona Inter-Tribal Dictionary: 'Iipay Aa Tiipay Aa Uumall''. Lakeside, CA: Barona Museum Press. * Mithun, Marianne. 1999. ''The Languages of Native North America''. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

External links

Jamul Tiipay basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
* Jamul Tiipay in The World Atlas of Language Structures - Online versio

{{Languages of Mexico Kumeyaay Indigenous languages of California Yuman–Cochimí languages Endangered indigenous languages of the Americas