Picuris (also Picurís) is a language of the Northern Tiwa branch of

Tanoan Tanoan ( ), also Kiowa–Tanoan or Tanoan–Kiowa, is a family of languages spoken by indigenous peoples in present-day New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Most of the languages – Tiwa (Taos, Picuris, Southern Tiwa), Tewa, and Towa � ...

spoken in Picuris Pueblo,

New Mexico New Mexico is a state in the Southwestern United States, Southwestern region of the United States. It is one of the Mountain States of the southern Rocky Mountains, sharing the Four Corners region with Utah, Colorado, and Arizona. It also ...

Classification

Picuris is partially

mutually intelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intellig ...

with Taos dialect, spoken at

Taos Pueblo Taos Pueblo (or Pueblo de Taos) is an ancient pueblo belonging to a Taos language, Taos-speaking (Tiwa languages, Tiwa) Native American tribe of Puebloan peoples, Puebloan people. It lies about north of the modern city of Taos, New Mexico. T ...

. It is slightly more distantly related to

Southern Tiwa The Southern Tiwa language is a Tanoan language spoken at Sandia Pueblo and Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico and Ysleta del Sur in Texas. Classification Southern Tiwa belongs to the Tiwa sub-grouping of the Kiowa–Tanoan language family. It is cl ...

(spoken at Isleta Pueblo and

Sandia Pueblo Sandia Pueblo (; Tiwa: Tuf Shur Tia) is a federally recognized tribe of Native American Pueblo people inhabiting a reservation of the same name in the eastern Rio Grande Rift of central New Mexico. It is one of 19 of New Mexico's Native Ameri ...

Phonology

: * The consonants are only found in recent Spanish

loanword 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 ...

s. * G. Trager (1942, 1943) analyzed Picuris as also having aspirated stops ,

ejective In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some l ...

stops , and

labialized Labialization is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound. The term is normally restricted to consonants. When vowels invol ...

. These are considered by F. Trager (1971) to be sequences of , , and . * Velar has strong frication. * Stops are

unaspirated In phonetics, aspiration is a strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with thei ...

while may be slightly aspirated. * The

affricate An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pai ...

freely varies with a more forward articulation : for example, F. Trager recorded the word "witch" with an initial but the related word "witch chief" with initial .F. Trager does not give further details about whether the forward articulation is dental or alveolar. If Picuris is like Taos, then the most forward articulation would be alveolar. G. Trager states that the articulation is consistently post-alveolar (and does not mention free variation). * The sequence is only found in a single word . * Alveolar has an assimilated velar variant when it precedes labio-velar . * Nasal in a low-toned syllable is partially devoiced and denasalized before a glottal stop , as in " chokecherry" which is phonetically . * Fricative freely varies between a lateral fricative and a central-lateral fricative sequence * Lateral is palatalized before the high front vowel . * Only the

sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels a ...

s can occur in

syllable coda A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

position.

Vowels

Picuris has 6 vowels. Picuris also has nasalized counterparts for each vowel. : Picuris has three degrees of stress: ''primary'', ''secondary'', and ''unstressed''. Stress affects the phonetic length of

syllable rime A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

s (lengthening the vowel or the syllable-final sonorant consonant). Additionally, there are three tones: ''high'', ''mid'', and ''low'' — the mid tone being the most frequent.

Text

Two sentences with interlinear glosses:

Notes

Bibliography

* Harrington, John P.; & Roberts, Helen. (1928). Picuris children's stories with texts and songs. ''Bureau of American Ethnology: Annual report'', ''43'', 289-447. * Nichols, Lynn. (1994). Vowel copy and stress in Northern Tiwa (Picurís and Taos). In S. Epstein et al. (Eds.), ''Harvard working papers in linguistics'' (Vol. 4, pp. 133–140). * Nichols, Lynn. (1995). Referential hierarchies and C-command in Picurís. In S. Epstein et al. (Eds.), ''Harvard working papers in linguistics'' (Vol. 45, pp. 76–92). * Trager, Felicia. (1968). ''Picuris Pueblo, New Mexico: An ethnolinguistic "salvage" study''. (Doctoral dissertation, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY). * Trager, Felicia. (1971). The phonology of Picuris. ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', ''37'', 29-33. * Trager, Felicia. (1975). Morphemic change in Picuris: A case of culture contact? ''Studies in Linguistics'', ''25'', 89-93. * Trager, George L. (1942). The historical phonology of the Tiwa languages. ''Studies in Linguistics'', ''1'' (5), 1-10. * Trager, George L. (1943). The kinship and status terms of the Tiwa languages. ''American Anthropologist'', ''45'' (1), 557-571. * Trager, George L. (1969). Taos and Picuris: How long separated?. ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', ''35'' (2), 180-182. * Zaharlick, Ann Marie (Amy). (1975). Pronominal reference in Picurís. ''Studies in Linguistics'', ''25'', 79-88. * Zaharlick, Ann Marie (Amy). (1977). ''Picurís syntax''. (Doctoral dissertation, American University). * Zaharlick, Ann Marie (Amy). (1979). Picuris and English: Similarities and differences. In R. J. Rebert (Ed.), ''Language descriptions from Indian New Mexico'' (pp. 20–51). Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico, American Indian Bilingual Education Center, pp. * Zaharlick, Ann Marie (Amy). (1980). An outline of Picuris syntax. ''Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences'', ''345'', 147-163. * Zaharlick, Ann Marie (Amy). (1981). A preliminary examination of tone in Picuris. Special Issue: Native Languages of the Americas. ''Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest'', ''4'' (2), 123-129. * Zaharlick, Ann Marie (Amy). (1982). Tanoan studies: Passive sentences in Picuris. ''Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics'', ''26'', 34-48.

External links

Stress, length, and moraic trochees in Northern Tiwa Picurís
{{DEFAULTSORT:Picuris Language Tanoan languages Indigenous languages of New Mexico Indigenous languages of the Southwestern United States Indigenous languages of the North American Southwest