Yawelmani Yokuts (also spelled Yowlumne and Yauelmani) is an endangered dialect of

Southern Valley Yokuts Southern Valley Yokuts is a dialect network within the Valley Yokuts division of the Yokutsan languages spoken in the Central Valley of California. Among the dialects grouped under the label Southern Valley Yokuts are Wechihi, Tachi A ...

historically spoken by the

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 ...

living along the

Kern River The Kern River is an Endangered, Wild and Scenic river in the U.S. state of California, approximately long. It drains an area of the southern Sierra Nevada The Sierra Nevada ( ) is a mountain range in the Western United States, between ...

north of

Kern Lake Kern Lake,was the smallest of the three large lakes in the Tulare Basin, in the southwestern San Joaquin Valley of California. It was the first of the lakes fed by the Kern River. Kern Lake is now a dry lake bed, due to agricultural diversion o ...

in the Central Valley of California. Today, most Yawelmani speakers live on or near the

Tule River Reservation ''Schoenoplectus acutus'' ( syn. ''Scirpus acutus, Schoenoplectus lacustris, Scirpus lacustris'' subsp. ''acutus''), called tule , common tule, hardstem tule, tule rush, hardstem bulrush, or viscid bulrush, is a giant species of sedge in the p ...

Name

Academic sources frequently use the name ''Yawelmani'' while referring to the language, though tribe members more often use the name ''Yowlumne''. When referencing their language, modern speakers of Yawelmani use the terms (Indian), and (speech of the Yowlumne).

Speakers

A 2011 estimate by

Victor Golla Victor Golla (1939–2021) was a linguist who specialized in the indigenous languages of California and Oregon, especially the Pacific Coast Athabaskan subgroup of the Athabaskan language family and the languages of the region that belong to the ...

placed the number of fluent and semi-fluent Yawelmani speakers at "up to twenty-five"

Revitalization efforts

In 1993, the

Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program The Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program is a strategy used in language revitalization, in which committed language learners (apprentices) work with fluent speakers (mentors) to "create their own oral language-immersive context through daily ...

piloted a series of language programs that included Yawelmani. The program was reportedly effective in teaching conversational Yawelmani to tribal members without prior knowledge and increasing language use among elders.

Phonology

Consonants

* Sounds may be heard freely as retroflex among speakers.

Vowels

Yawelmani has 10

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

s: * There are 5 short-long vowel pairs. * Short high vowels may become more

centralized Centralisation or centralization (American English) is the process by which the activities of an organisation, particularly those regarding planning, decision-making, and framing strategies and policies, become concentrated within a particular ...

in fast speech: , . * Long high vowels are almost always lower than their short counterparts: , . * All long vowels may be shortened by a

phonological Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often prefer ...

process. Thus, a single long vowel has two different

phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

realizations: ** , ** , ** , ** , ** . * Note that the high long vowel is usually pronounced the same as and . * Note that the high long vowel is usually pronounced the same as and . As can be seen, Yawelmani vowels have a number of different realizations (

phones A telephone, colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that enables two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most ...

) which are summarized below:

Syllable & phonotactics

The Yawelmani

syllable 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 can be either a consonant-vowel sequence (CV), such as ''deeyi-'' 'lead', or a consonant-vowel-consonant sequence (CVC), such as ''xata-'' 'eat'. Thus the generalized syllable is the following: : CV(C) Word roots are bisyllabic and have either one of two shapes: * CV.CV * CV.CVC

Phonological processes

Vowel shortening

When long vowels are in closed

s, they are shortened: :

Vowel harmony

Yawelmani has

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...

es that contain either an

underspecified In theoretical linguistics, underspecification is a phenomenon in which certain features are omitted in underlying representations. Restricted underspecification theory holds that features should only be underspecified if their values are predicta ...

high vowel or an underspecified non-high vowel . * Underspecified will appear as following the high rounded vowel and as following all other vowels : : * Underspecified will appear as following the non-high rounded vowel and as following all other vowels : :

Vowel epenthesis

Yawelmani adds vowels to stems, when suffixes with an initial consonant are affixed to word with two final consonants in order to avoid a triple-consonant-cluster.

Grammar

Case system

Yawelmani is a primary object language.

A. L. 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 fir ...

documented the language's case system in his 1907 paper ''The Yokuts Language of South Central California.''

Selected vocabulary

File:Yowlumne body parts.svg, Yawelmani anatomy File:Yawelmani kinship.svg, Yawelmani kinship terms

References

External links

English/Yowlumne dictionaryYowlum'nen Trexul: Yowlumne phrase and lesson book
{{Penutian languages Endangered Yokutsan languages