Northern Paiute language

Northern Paiute
Paviotso
Numu, nɨɨmɨ
Native to	United States
Region	Nevada, California, Oregon, Idaho
Ethnicity	6,000 Northern Paiute and Bannock (1999)
Native speakers	700 (2007)
Language family	Uto-Aztecan Northern Numic Western Northern Paiute
Dialects	Northern Southern Bannock
Language codes
ISO 639-3	pao
Glottolog	nort2954
ELP	Northern Paiute
Map showing the traditional geographic distribution of Northern Paiute and Mono
Northern Paiute is classified as Definitely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Northern Paiute /ˈpaɪuːt/, endonym Numu or nɨɨmɨ, also known as Paviotso, is a Western Numic language of the Uto-Aztecan family, which had around 500 fluent speakers in 1994 according to Marianne Mithun. It is closely related to the Mono language.

Language revitalization

In 2005, the Northwest Indian Language Institute at the University of Oregon formed a partnership to teach Northern Paiute and Kiksht in schools on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. In 2013, Washoe County, Nevada became the first school district in Nevada to offer Northern Paiute classes, offering an elective Northern Paiute course 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 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.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i	ɨ	u
Open-Mid	e		ɔ
Open		a

Morphology

Northern Paiute is an agglutinative language in which words use suffix complexes with several morphemes strung together for a variety of purposes.

References

Bibliography

• Liljeblad, Sven; Fowler, Catherine S.; Powell, Glenda (2012). The Northern Paiute-Bannock Dictionary, with an English-Northern Paiute-Bannock Finder List and a Northern Paiute-Bannock-English Finder List. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ISBN 978-1-60781-030-8.
• Mithun, Marianne (1999). Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Snapp, Allen; Anderson, John L.; Anderson, Joy (1982). "Northern Paiute". In Langacker, Ronald W. (ed.). Sketches in Uto-Aztecan grammar, III: Uto-Aztecan grammatical sketches. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics. Vol. 57. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington. pp. 1–92. ISBN 0-88312-072-0. [The publication erroneously stated vol. 56, but this has been amended in the PDF made available online by the publisher.]
• Thornes, Tim (2003). A Northern Paiute Grammar with Texts (PhD thesis). Eugene: University of Oregon.

External links

• Northern Paiute language overview at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
• Northern Paiute Indian Language (Paviotso, Bannock)
• Northern Paiute resources at the Open Language Archives Community
• Northern Paiute Language Project, University of California, Santa Cruz
• World Atlas of Language Structures: Northern Paiute