Cupeño is an

extinct Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

Uto-Aztecan Uto-Aztecan, Uto-Aztekan or (rarely in English) Uto-Nahuatl is a family of indigenous languages of the Americas, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The na ...

language, formerly spoken by the

Cupeño people The Cupeño (or Kuupangaxwichem) are a Native American tribe of Southern California. They traditionally lived about inland and north of the modern day Mexico–United States border in the Peninsular Range of Southern California. Today their ...

of Southern

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

, United States. Roscinda Nolasquez (d. 1987) was the last native speaker of Cupeño. The Cupeño people now speak English. The native name Kupangaxwicham means 'people from the sleeping place' referring to their traditional homeland, prior to 1902, of Ktipa (at the base of Warner's Hot Springs). A smaller village was located to the South of Ktipa, named Wildkalpa. Throughout the 1890s it was debated whether or not the Cupeño peoples should be allowed to continue living on traditional Cupeño territory. After many years of public protests the California Supreme Court decided to relocate the Cupeño people to the Pala Reservation. Cupeño has linguistic influence from both the languages that preceded it and the

Yuman The Quechan (or Yuma) (Quechan: ''Kwatsáan'' 'those who descended') are a Native American tribe who live on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation on the lower Colorado River in Arizona and California just north of the Mexican border. Despite th ...

-speaking

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 ...

, who shared their southern border.

Region

The language was originally spoken in Cupa, Wilaqalpa, and Paluqla, San Diego County, California, and later around the

Pala Indian Reservation The Pala Indian Reservation is located in the middle of San Luis Rey River Valley in northern San Diego County, California, east of the community of Fallbrook, California, Fallbrook, and has been assigned feature ID 272502. Historic variant names ...

Morphology

Cupeño 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 l ...

language, where 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. Cupeño is dominantly

head-final In linguistics, head directionality is a proposed parameter that classifies languages according to whether they are head-initial (the head of a phrase precedes its complements) or head-final (the head follows its complements). The head is the ...

, with a mostly strict word order ( SOV) for some constituents, e.g. genitive-noun constructions. But some contexts allow departure from the SOV word order, this may include shifting verbs to be the initial part of a sentence or moving arguments to follow verbs.

Nouns

Nouns (as well as demonstratives, determiners, quantifiers, and adjectives) in Cupeño are marked for case and number and agree with each other in complex nominal constructions.

Verbs

Cupeño inflects its verbs for transitivity, tense, aspect, mood, person, number, and

evidentiality In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential (also verificational or validational) is the particul ...

. Evidentiality is expressed in Cupeño with

clitics In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...

, which generally appear near the beginning of the sentence. ''=kuʼut'' 'reportative' (''mu=kuʼut'' 'and it is said that...') ''=am'' 'mirative' ''=$he'' 'dubitative' There are two inflected moods, realis ''=pe'' and irrealis ''=eʼp''.

Tense-Aspect system

Future simple verbs are unmarked. Past simple verbs have past-tense pronouns; past imperfect add the imperfect modifier shown below.

Pronouns

The pronominals of Cupeño appear in many different forms and structures. The following appear attached only to past-tense verbs.

Phonology

Vowels

and appear largely in Spanish

loanwords A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because th ...

, but also as

allophones In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...

of in native Cupeño words. can also be realized as in closed syllables, and in some open syllables. may reduce to schwa in unstressed syllables. also appears as when long and stressed, after labials and , and as before . is also realized as before uvulars.

Consonants

Lexicon

References

External links

*, Four Directions Institute
Cupeño language
Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
OLAC resources in and about the Cupeño language
Cupeno Takic Takic languages Extinct languages of North America Languages extinct in the 1980s {{NorthAm-native-stub