Havasupai–Hualapai (Havasupai–Walapai) is a Native American language spoken by the
Hualapai
The Hualapai ( , ) are a federally recognized Native American tribe in Arizona with about 2300 enrolled citizens. Approximately 1353 enrolled citizens reside on the Hualapai Reservation, which spans over three counties in Northern Arizona ( Coc ...
and
Havasupai
The Havasupai people (Havasupai: ''Havsuw' Baaja'') are a Native American people and tribe who have lived in the Grand Canyon for at least the past 800 years. Their name means "people of the blue-green water", referring to Havasu Creek, a t ...
peoples of northwestern Arizona. Havasupai–Hualapai belongs to the Pai branch of the
Yuman–Cochimà language family, together with its close relative
Yavapai
The Yavapai ( ) are a Native American tribe in Arizona. Their Yavapai language belongs to the Upland Yuman branch of the proposed Hokan language family.
Today Yavapai people are enrolled in the following federally recognized tribes:
* Fort ...
and with
Paipai, a language spoken in northern Baja California. There are two main dialects of this language: the Havasupai dialect is spoken in the bottom of the
Grand Canyon
The Grand Canyon is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River in Arizona, United States. The Grand Canyon is long, up to wide and attains a depth of over a mile ().
The canyon and adjacent rim are contained within Grand Canyon Nati ...
, while the Hualapai dialect is spoken along the southern rim. As of 2010, there were approximately 1500 speakers of Havasupai-Hualapai.
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 ...
classifies the Havasupai dialect as endangered and the Hualapai dialect as vulnerable.
[ There are efforts at preserving both dialects through bilingual education programs.]
Regional variation and mutual intelligibility
The modern Hualapai and Havasupai have separate sociopolitical identities, but a consensus among linguists is that the differences in speech among them lie only at the dialect level, rather than constituting separate languages, and the differences between the two dialects have been reported as "negligible".
The language even bears similarity to Yavapai
The Yavapai ( ) are a Native American tribe in Arizona. Their Yavapai language belongs to the Upland Yuman branch of the proposed Hokan language family.
Today Yavapai people are enrolled in the following federally recognized tribes:
* Fort ...
, and sometimes they are grouped together for means of linguistic classification (see Ethnologue). Regarding the relationship of Havasupai and Hualapai to Yavapai, Warren Gazzam, a Tolkapaya Yavapai speaker, reported that "they (Hualapais) speak the same language as we do, some words or accents are a little different".
Phonology
Consonants
For illustrative purposes, the following chart is the consonant inventory of the Hualapai dialect of the language, which varies slightly from the Havasupai dialect. Because the two dialects have different orthographies, IPA symbols are used here. For more information about how these sounds are depicted in writing, see the Orthography section of this page.
As shown from the chart above, aspiration is a contrastive feature in many stops and affricates in Hualapai-Havasupai. Often, consonant sounds are realized in different ways in different phonetic environments. For example, if a glottal stop occurs at the beginning of a word, it may sometimes be replaced by a vowel such as /a/.
The phonemic difference between /β/ and /v/ is widely discussed in the literature. Watahomigie et al. poses that the use of /β/ is attributed to older generations of Hualapai dialect speakers, and Edwin Kozlowski notes that in the Hualapai dialect, is weakened to �in weak-stressed syllables. Thus, the underlying form /v-ul/ "to ride" surfaces as �əʔul
Long and short vowels are contrastive in the language. The following is a minimal pair illustrating of the phonemic contrast of Havasupai-Hualapai vowel length: vs. .
Short vowels may sometimes be reduced to �or dropped completely when they occur in an unstressed syllable, primarily in a word-initial context. In addition to this chart, there are four attested diphthongs that are common for this language: /aʊ/ as in 'cow', /aɪ/ as in 'lie', /eɪ/ as in 'they', and /ui/ as in 'buoy'.
Stress
Havasupai-Hualapai's prosodic system is stress-timed
Isochrony is a linguistic analysis or hypothesis assuming that any spoken language's utterances are divisible into equal rhythmic portions of some kind. Under this assumption, languages are proposed to broadly fall into one of two categories based ...
, which governs many parts of the phonological structure of the language, including where long vowels occur, what kind of consonant clusters can occur and where, and how syllable boundaries are divided. There are three types of stress: primary, secondary, and weak. All vowels can have any of these three types of stress, but syllabic consonant
A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''awful'', respectively. To represe ...
s can only have weak stress. Primary stresses occur at regularly timed intervals in an utterance. Secondary stresses occur according to an alternating-stress system, which most commonly dictates that two secondary stresses follow a primary stressed (phonetically long) vowel.
Syllabic structure
The most common syllable structures that occur in Havasupai-Hualapai are CV, CVC, and VC; however, consonant clusters of two or three consonants can and do occur initially, medially, and finally.
At word boundaries, syllabification breaks up consonant clusters to CVC or CV structure as much as is possible. CCC and CCCC clusters occur, but they are always broken up by a syllable boundary (that is, C-CC/CC-C or CC-CC). Syllable-initial CC clusters are either composed of (1) /θ/, /s/, or /h/, followed by any consonant or (2) any consonant followed by /w/.
Morphology
Morphologically, Hualapai-Havasupai is classified by WALS as weakly suffixing. There are different affixes for nouns, verbs, and particles in Hualapai-Havasupai, and there exist suffixes that can change nouns to verbs and vice versa. The affixes that exist—apart from word roots—are generally short in phonemic length, restricted to C, CV, VC, or V in composition.
Verbs
Verbs are marked for person (first, second, and third) through the prefixes /a-/, /ma-/, and /ø-/, respectively. Many other affixes attach to the verb to reveal information like tense, aspect, modality
Modality may refer to:
Humanities
* Modality (theology), the organization and structure of the church, as distinct from sodality or parachurch organizations
* Modality (music), in music, the subject concerning certain diatonic scales
* Modalit ...
, number, adverbial qualities, and conjunctivity. The verb suffixes /-wi/ and /-yu/ are divisive for verbs and are weak-stressed by-forms of /wÃ/, meaning ''do'', and /yú/, meaning ''be.'' These occur on all verbs. The three numbers that can be marked in verbs are singular, paucal
In linguistics, grammatical number is a feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and many other languages present number categories of singula ...
plural, and multiple plural. There are six types of aspect, and any verb can have as many as three and as few as zero aspect markers. The six types are distributive-iterative, continued, interrupted, perfective, imperfective, and habitual.
Nouns
Nouns are marked for number, case, definiteness
In linguistics, definiteness is a semantic feature of noun phrases that distinguishes between referents or senses that are identifiable in a given context (definite noun phrases) and those that are not (indefinite noun phrases). The prototypical ...
, and demonstrative
Demonstratives (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic, their meaning ...
ness, as can be seen by the lists of noun suffixes and prefixes below:
* Noun prefixes
** Subordinate: /-ɲi/ 'subordinate to, related to'
** Intensive: /vi-/ 'very, just'
* Noun suffixes
** Number: /-t͡ʃ/ paucal plural, /-uv/ multiple plural, no affix for singular number
** Demonstrative: /-ɲ/ that, /-v/ this
** Definiteness: /-a/ the (a certain), /-i/ the (this other), /-u/ the (that other), /-o/, the former (that)
** Case: /-t͡ʃ/ nominative, /-ø/ accusative, /-k/ allative-adessive, /-l/ illative-inessive, /-m/ ablative-abessive
** Appellative: /-é/ vocative
Particles
Particles exist as interjections, adverbs, possessive pronouns, and articles. There are relatively few particles that exist in the language. They can be marked through prefixes for subordination and intensity in the same way as nouns and through the suffix /-é/, which indicates adverbial place.
Syntax
Word order
Havasupai-Hualapai's basic word order is S-O-V. For noun phrases, articles
Article often refers to:
* Article (grammar), a grammatical element used to indicate definiteness or indefiniteness
* Article (publishing), a piece of nonfictional prose that is an independent part of a publication
Article(s) may also refer to:
...
, such as demonstrative
Demonstratives (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic, their meaning ...
s, occur as suffixes.
Case marking
Havasupai-Hualapai has a nominative/accusative case marking system, as mentioned in the morphology section.
Noun incorporation
It is said that noun incorporation
In linguistics, incorporation is a phenomenon by which a grammatical category, such as a verb, forms a compound (linguistics), compound with its direct object (object incorporation) or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntax, synt ...
occurs in the language. This is notable with verbs of belonging, such as with the noun "nyigwáy(ya)," meaning "shirt." To say "to be wearing a shirt" the noun form "nyigwáy" is incorporated into the verb, appearing with a prefix for person, and suffixes for reflexiveness and auxiliaries. The noun form obligatorily also occurs before its incorporated verb form:
Similar processes occur with kinship terms and verbs of belonging such as with the following noun "bi:", which means "female's brother's child/nephew/niece":
This can be considered a more iconic form of noun incorporation, as the noun doesn't also occur outside the incorporate verb form.
Switch-reference
Havasupai-Hualapai, like other Yuman languages, is known for its switch-reference
In linguistics, switch-reference (SR) describes any clause-level morpheme that signals whether certain prominent arguments in 'adjacent' clauses are reference, coreferential. In most cases, it marks whether the subject (grammar), subject of the v ...
. This is a mechanism that illustrates whether the subjects are the same for multiple verbs within a sentence. The marker "-k" states that the subject-references are identical, and the marker "-m" is used when the first and second subjects are different for two verbs. The following sentences are examples of each, with the markers bolded for illustrative purposes:
: Identical subject-reference "-k"
Note that in the following sentence, both subject markers are used:
: Different subject-reference "-m"
Orthography
Havasupai and Hualapai have developed separate orthographies in order to distinguish the two tribes socially and culturally. Hualapai's orthography was developed in the 1970s partly as an effort to preserve the language for pedagogical and historical purposes. Both of the orthographies are adapted from the Latin Script
The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...
.
Havasupai dialect
This dialect is spoken by approximately 639 people on the Havasupai Indian Reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon
The Grand Canyon is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River in Arizona, United States. The Grand Canyon is long, up to wide and attains a depth of over a mile ().
The canyon and adjacent rim are contained within Grand Canyon Nati ...
. According to a 2015 ''New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' article, it was considered the only Native American language
The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples. Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while many more are now e ...
in the United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
spoken by 100% of its tribal members. Also as of 2005, Havasupai remained the first language of residents of Supai Village, the tribal government seat.
The Lord's Prayer, John 3:16, and hymns were printed in Havasupai in 1934.
As of 2004, "a Wycliffe Bible Translators project ... under way to translate the Old and the New Testaments into the Havasupai language" was progressing slowly. The project was started around 1978.
See also
* Havasu 'Baaja, the people generally called ''Havasupai'' by English-speakers.
References
Bibliography
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Further reading
* "A dictionary of the Havasupai language". Hinton, Leanne. Supai, Arizona 1984.
* "Gwe gnaavja". Havasu Baaja / Havasupai Tribe, Bilingual Education Program. Supai, Arizona 1985.
* "Havsuw gwaawj tñudg siitja". Havasupai Bilingual Education Program. Supai, Arizona 1970s(?).
* "Baahj muhm hatm hwag gyu". Hinton, Leanne et al., prepared by the Havasupai Bilingual Education Program. Supai, Arizona 1978.
* "Tim: Tñuda Hobaja". Hinton, Leanne et al., prepared by the Havasupai Bilingual Education Program (authors credited as "Viya Tñudv Leanne Hinton-j, Rena Crook-m, Edith Putesoy-m hmug-g yoovjgwi. Clark Jack-j"). Supai, Arizona 1978–1984.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Havasupai-Hualapai language
Hualapai
Yuman–Cochimà languages
Indigenous languages of Arizona