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Colorado River Numic language

Colorado River
Southern Paiute
Native to United States
Region Nevada, California, Utah, Arizona, Colorado
Ethnicity 6,200 Chemehuevi, Southern Paiute and Ute (2007)
Native speakers
920 (2007)
20 monolinguals (1990 census)
Uto-Aztecan
  • Numic
    • Southern Numic
      • Colorado River
Dialects
  • Chemehuevi
  • Southern Paiute
  • Ute
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Glottolog utes1238
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

Colorado River Numic (also called Ute /ˈjuːt/, Southern Paiute /ˈpjuːt/, Ute–Southern Paiute, or Ute-Chemehuevi /ɛmˈwvi/), 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 (Moapa, Cedar City, Kaibab, and San Juan subdialects), and Ute (Central Utah, Northern, White Mesa, Southern subdialects). According to the Ethnologue, there were a little less than two thousand speakers of Colorado River Numic Language in 1990, or ca. 40% out of an ethnic population of 5,000.

The Southern Paiute dialect has played 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.


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Wikipedia

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