|
Colorado River Numic (also called Ute , Southern Paiute /ˈpaɪjuːt/, and Ute-Southern Paiute or Southern Paiute-Ute), of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family, is a dialect chain that stretches from southeastern California to Colorado. Individual dialects are Chemehuevi, which is in danger of extinction, Southern Paiute (of which San Juan and Kaibab are subdialects), and Ute (in northern and southern dialects). According to the Ethnologue, there were a little less than two thousand speakers of Colorado River in 1990, or ca. 40% out of an ethnic population of 5,000.
The Southern Paiute dialect has had a significant role in linguistics, as the background for a famous article by linguist Edward Sapir and his collaborator Tony Tillohash on the nature of the phoneme.
|
|
RSS