The Cupeño language is an

extinct Extinction is the termination of an organism by the death of its Endling, last member. A taxon may become Functional extinction, functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to Reproduction, reproduce and ...

Uto-Aztecan The Uto-Aztecan languages are a family of native American languages, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The name of the language family reflects the common ...

language, once spoken by the Cupeño people of southern

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

, United States. Roscinda Nolasquez (d. 1987) was the last native speaker of Cupeño. The Cupeño people now speak English. The native name 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, there was debate over whether the Cupeño people should be allowed to continue living on traditional Cupeño territory. After many years of public protests, the

California Supreme Court The Supreme Court of California is the highest and final court of appeals in the courts of the U.S. state of California. It is headquartered in San Francisco at the Earl Warren Building, but it regularly holds sessions in Los Angeles and Sac ...

decided to relocate the Cupeño people to the Pala Reservation. Cupeño shows linguistic influence from both the languages that preceded it and the Yuman-speaking Ipai, who share their southern border.

Geographic distribution

The language was originally spoken in Cupa, Wilaqalpa, and Paluqla, located in

San Diego County San Diego County (), officially the County of San Diego, is a county in the southwest corner of the U.S. state of California, north to its border with Mexico. As of the 2020 census, the population was 3,298,634; it is the second-most populous ...

, California, and later around the Pala Indian Reservation.

Phonology

Vowels

and primarily occur in Spanish

loanwords A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...

but also serve as

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

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

Consonants

Morphology

Cupeño is an

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

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

morpheme A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...

s strung together. It is dominantly head-final, with a mostly strict word order ( SOV) for some constituents, such as genitive-noun constructions. However, in certain contexts, there is flexibility in the word order, allowing verbs to be shifted to the initial part of a sentence or 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 in Cupeño is expressed with

clitics In Morphology (linguistics), morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , Back-formation, backformed from Ancient Greek, Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) ...

, typically appearing near the beginning of the sentence: ''='' 'reportative' (''='' 'and it is said that...') ''='' 'mirative' ''='' 'dubitative' There are two inflected moods, realis ''='' and irrealis ''=''.

Tense-Aspect system

Future simple verbs remain unmarked. Past simple verbs include past-tense pronouns, while past imperfect verbs add the imperfect modifier as shown below.

Pronouns

The pronominals in Cupeño manifest in various forms and structures. The following are only attached to past-tense verbs.

Lexicon

References

External links

*, Four Directions Institute
Cupeño language

OLAC resources in and about the Cupeño language
Cupeño

Takic The Takic languages are a putative group of Uto-Aztecan languages historically spoken by a number of Indigenous peoples of California, Indigenous peoples of Southern California. Takic is grouped with the Tübatulabal language, Tubatulabal, Hopi la ...

Takic languages Extinct languages of North America Languages extinct in the 1980s {{UtoAztecan-lang-stub