Mono ( ) is a Native American language of the

Numic Numic is the northernmost 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. Th ...

group of

Uto-Aztecan languages 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 ...

, the ancestral language of the

Mono people The Mono ( ) are a Native American people who traditionally live in the central Sierra Nevada, the Eastern Sierra (generally south of Bridgeport), the Mono Basin, and adjacent areas of the Great Basin. They are often grouped under the histo ...

. Mono consists of two dialects, ''Eastern'' and ''Western''. The name "Monachi" is commonly used in reference to Western Mono and "Owens Valley Paiute" in reference to Eastern Mono. In 1925,

Alfred Kroeber Alfred Louis Kroeber ( ; June 11, 1876 – October 5, 1960) was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the fi ...

estimated that Mono had 3,000 to 4,000 speakers. , only 37 elderly people spoke Mono as their first language. It is classified as

critically endangered An IUCN Red List critically endangered (CR or sometimes CE) species is one that has been categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as facing an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild. As of December 2023, of t ...

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) with the aim of promoting world peace and International secur ...

. It is spoken in the southern

Sierra Nevada The Sierra Nevada ( ) is a mountain range in the Western United States, between the Central Valley of California and the Great Basin. The vast majority of the range lies in the state of California, although the Carson Range spur lies primari ...

, the

Mono Basin The Mono Basin is an endorheic drainage basin located east of Yosemite National Park in California and Nevada. It is bordered to the west by the Sierra Nevada, to the east by the Cowtrack Mountains, to the north by the Bodie Hills, and to the s ...

, and the

Owens Valley Owens Valley (Mono language (California), Mono: ''Payahǖǖnadǖ'', meaning "place of flowing water") is an arid valley of the Owens River in eastern California in the United States. It is located to the east of the Sierra Nevada (U.S.), Sierra ...

of central-eastern

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 ...

. Mono is most closely related to

Northern Paiute Northern may refer to the following: Geography * North, a point in direction * Northern Europe, the northern part or region of Europe * Northern Highland, a region of Wisconsin, United States * Northern Province, Sri Lanka * Northern Range, a ...

; these two are classified as the Western group of the

branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family."Mono."
''Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley.'' 2009-2010 (retrieved 6 May 2010)

Western Mono

The number of Native speakers in 1994 ranged from 37 to 41. The majority of speakers are from the Northfork Rancheria and the community of Auberry. The Big Sandy Rancheria and Dunlap have from 12 to 14 speakers. The Northfork Mono are developing a dictionary, and both they and the Big Sandy Rancheria provide language classes. While not all are completely fluent, about 100 members of Northfork have "some command of the language." In the late 1950s, Lamb compiled a dictionary and grammar of Northfork Mono. The Western Mono language has a number of Spanish loanwords dating to the period of Spanish colonization of

the Californias The Californias (), occasionally known as the Three Californias or the Two Californias, are a region of North America spanning the United States and Mexico, consisting of the U.S. state of California and the Mexican states of Baja California a ...

, as well as loanwords from

Yokuts The Yokuts (previously known as MariposasPowell, 1891:90–91.) are an ethnic group of Native Americans native to central California. Before European contact, the Yokuts consisted of up to 60 tribes speaking several related languages. Yokuts ...

and

Miwok The Miwok (also spelled Miwuk, Mi-Wuk, or Me-Wuk) are members of four linguistically related Native Americans in the United States, Native American groups indigenous to what is now Northern California, who traditionally spoke one of the Miwok lan ...

Owens Valley Paiute

In the mid-1990s, an estimated 50 people spoke the Owens Valley Paiute language, also known as Eastern Mono. Informal language classes exist and singers keep native language songs alive. Linguist

Sydney Lamb Sydney MacDonald Lamb (born May 4, 1929 in Denver, Colorado) is an American linguist. He is the Arnold Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Rice University. His scientific contributions have been wide-ranging, including thos ...

studied this language in the 1950s and proposed the name Paviotso, but that was not widely adopted.The Handbook of Indians of California, by A. L. Kroeber (1919) says that the Owens Valley Paiutes are Northern Paiute or Mono/Bannock.

Phonemes

Vowels

* Vowel length is also evenly distributed among the dialects.

Consonants

Below is given the consonant phoneme inventory of Northfork Western Mono and Owens Valley Paiute as presented by Lamb (1958) and Liljeblad & Fowler (1986). * Geminated sounds of plosives, nasals and fricatives are also evenly distributed.

Suprasegmental

Lamb (1958) also described four

suprasegmental In linguistics, prosody () is the study of elements of speech, including intonation, stress, rhythm and loudness, that occur simultaneously with individual phonetic segments: vowels and consonants. Often, prosody specifically refers to such ele ...

features that he ascribed phonemic status.

Morphology

Mono 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, in which 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.

References

Sources

* * * * * * * *

External links

*
Mono language
overview at the

Survey of California and Other Indian Languages The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (originally the Survey of California Indian Languages) at the University of California at Berkeley documents, catalogs, and archives the indigenous languages of the Americas. The survey also hosts ...

*
OLAC resources in and about the Mono language
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mono language Mono people Agglutinative languages Numic languages Indigenous languages of California Indigenous languages of the North American Great Basin Endangered Uto-Aztecan languages Native American language revitalization