Northern Paiute ,

endonym An endonym (also known as autonym ) is a common, name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language, or dialect, meaning that it is used inside a particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate them ...

Numu or nɨɨmɨ, also known as Paviotso, is a Western Numic language of the

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 ...

family, which according to Marianne Mithun had around 500 fluent speakers in 1994. It is closely related to the Mono language.

Language revitalization

In 2005, the Northwest Indian Language Institute of the

University of Oregon The University of Oregon (UO, U of O or Oregon) is a Public university, public research university in Eugene, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1876, the university is organized into nine colleges and schools and offers 420 undergraduate and gra ...

formed a partnership to teach Northern Paiute and Kiksht in the Warm Springs Indian Reservation schools. In 2013,

Washoe County, Nevada Washoe County () is a county in the U.S. state of Nevada. As of the 2020 census, the population was 486,492, making it Nevada's second-most populous county. Its county seat is Reno. Washoe County is included in the Reno, NV Metropolitan Sta ...

became the first school district in Nevada to offer Northern Paiute classes, offering an elective course in the language at Spanish Springs High School. Classes have also been taught at Reed High School in Sparks, Nevada. Elder Ralph Burns of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation worked with

University of Nevada, Reno The University of Nevada, Reno (Nevada, the University of Nevada, or UNR) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Reno, Nevada, United States. It is the state's flagship public university and prim ...

linguist Catherine Fowler to help develop a spelling system. The alphabet uses 19 letters. They have also developed a language-learning book, “Numa Yadooape,” and a series of computer disks of language lessons.

Phonology

Northern Paiute's phonology is highly variable, and its phonemes have many allophones.

Consonants

Vowels

Morphology

Northern Paiute 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

Bibliography

* * * he publication erroneously stated vol. 56, but this has been amended in the PDF made available online by the publisher.*

External links

Northern Paiute 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 ...

Northern Paiute Indian Language (Paviotso, Bannock)Northern Paiute resources at the Open Language Archives CommunityNorthern Paiute Language Project
University of California, Santa Cruz
World Atlas of Language Structures: Northern Paiute
Agglutinative languages Northern Paiute Numic languages Indigenous languages of Idaho Indigenous languages of California Indigenous languages of Oregon Indigenous languages of Nevada Indigenous languages of the Southwestern United States Indigenous languages of the North American Southwest Indigenous languages of the North American Great Basin Native American language revitalization {{UtoAztecan-lang-stub