Mono ( ) is a Native American language of the Numic group of

Uto-Aztecan languages 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 ...

, 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. The Eastern mono is often grouped under ...

. 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 first ...

estimated that Mono had 3,000 to 4,000 speakers. only about 40 elderly people spoke Mono as their first language. It is classified as critically endangered by

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. I ...

. 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, and the

Owens Valley Owens Valley (Numic: ''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, west of the White Mountains and Inyo Mo ...

of central-eastern

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 ...

. Mono is most closely related to Northern Paiute; these two are classified as the Western group of the Numic branch of the

Uto-Aztecan language family 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 ...

."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 The North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians of California is a federally recognized tribe of Mono Native Americans. North Fork Rancheria is the name of the tribe's reservation, which is located in Madera County, California.Pritzker, 137 Nim is their ...

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."Hinton, 31 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 ( Spanish: ''Las Californias''), occasionally known as The Three Californias or 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 ...

, 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. ''Yokut ...

and

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

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 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

Below is given the phoneme inventory of Northfork Western Mono as presented by Lamb (1958).

Vowels

Consonants

Suprasegmental

Lamb (1958) also described four suprasegmental 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, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...

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

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone ar ...

s strung together.

References

Sources

*Hinton, Leanne. ''Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages.'' Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1994. . *Miller, Wick R. "Numic Languages." ''Handbook of North American Indians: Great Basin, Volume 11.'' Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1986. . *

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 tribe Agglutinative languages Numic languages Indigenous languages of California Indigenous languages of the North American Great Basin Endangered Uto-Aztecan languages Native American language revitalization