Kitanemuk language

Kitanemuk was a Northern Uto-Aztecan language of the Serran branch. It was very closely related to Serrano, and may have been a dialect. It was spoken in the San Gabriel Mountains and foothill environs of Southern California. The last speakers lived some time in the 1940s, though the last fieldwork was carried out in 1937. J. P. Harrington took copious notes in the 1916 and 1917, however, which has allowed for a fairly detailed knowledge of the language.

Kitanemuk
Native toUnited States
RegionSouthern California
EthnicityKitanemuk
ExtinctLast spoken in the 1940s by Marcelino Rivera, Isabella Gonzales, and Refugia Duran
Language codes
ISO 639-3None (mis)
Glottologkita1252

Morphology

Kitanemuk is an agglutinative language, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several morphemes strung together.

Phonology

Consonants

The consonant phonemes of Kitanemuk, as reconstructed by Anderton (1988) based on Harrington's field notes, were (with some standard Americanist phonetic notation in ⟨angle brackets⟩:

Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
plain labio.
Nasal /m/ /n/ /ŋ/
Plosive /p/ /t/ /k/ /kʷ/ /ʔ/
Affricate /ts/ ⟨c⟩ /tʃ/ ⟨č⟩
Fricative /v/ /s/ /ʃ/ ⟨š⟩ /h/
Rhotic /r/
Approximant /l /j/ ⟨y⟩ /w/

Word-finally, /h/ becomes [r], and all voiced consonants become voiceless before other voiceless consonants or word-finally.

Vowels
Front Central Back
Close i ɨ u
Mid e o
Open a

See also

References
  • Anderton, Alice J. (1988). The Language of the Kitanemuks of California. PhD. diss., University of California, Los Angeles.
  • Mithun, Marianne (1999). The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.