Uto-Aztecan Language Family

Culture areas: Great Basin, Southwest

Tribes affected: Bannock, Comanche, Hopi, Kawaiisu, Mono, Nortern Paiute, Numaga, Pima, Shoshone, Southern Paiute, Ute, Yaqui

In historical times, speakers of Uto-Aztecan languages have lived in widely diverse western landscapes, from harsh desert to lush woodlands. Their territory lies as far north as central Idaho and as far south as northern Central America and covers large tracts of the Great Basin and Southwest. As diverse as the landscape are the types of cultures represented among Uto-Aztecan tribes—hunter-gatherers, nomads, agriculturalists, city dwellers, and empire builders. The family’s surviving daughter languages are spoken not only by some of the most famous tribes in the West—Paiute, Shoshone, Hopi, Comanche, and Pima—but also by the architects of one of Mesoamerica’s most sophisticated civilizations, the Aztecs.

Nahuatl, the Aztec language, first received formal study when Padre Fray Andres de Olmos, a Spaniard, wrote a grammar of it in 1547. Appearing only twenty-six years after Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztecs, the grammar was part of missionary efforts to convert the pagan Americans and stands as one of the earliest works of New World linguistics. Few of the other Uto-Aztecan languages, especially those in the United States, attracted scholarly attention until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By then some already had become extinct.

Member Languages

Scholars generally agree on the subdivisions of the Uto-Aztecan family and the member languages of each. There are eight branches: Numic, which includes Northern Paiute, Mono, Monoachi, Koso, Shoshone, Comanche, Ute, Kawaiisu, Southern Paiute, and Chemehuevi; Tubatulabal; Takic, which includes Gabrielino (extinct), Fernandeño, Kitanemuk (extinct), Serrano, Luiseño, Cahuilla, and Cupeño; Hopi; Pimic, which includes Pima, Pima Bajo, Tepecano (extinct), Northern Tepehuan, and Southern Tepehuan; Taracahitic, which includes Tubar (extinct), Tarahumara, Guarijío, Yaqui, Opata, and Cahita; Corachol, which includes Cora and Huichol; and Aztecan, which includes Pochutla (extinct), Pipil, and classical and modern Nahuatl. The first four branches and Pima from the Pimic branch are spoken in the United States, mostly in the Great Basin culture area or areas near the southern Sierra Nevada and in southern Arizona and New Mexico. The number of speakers in these areas has declined steadily in the twentieth century. Pima is typical: It shrank by nearly two-thirds between 1970 and 1980, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The languages in Mexico and Central America fared much better during the same period.

Origins

The origins of Uto-Aztecan are obscured in prehistory. Nevertheless, vocabulary among the member languages, especially common plant and animal names, provides some clues, as has evidence from archaeology and anthropology. Linguists have proposed that about five thousand years ago Uto-Aztecan tribes lived in a cohesive area covering part of southeastern California, the tip of Nevada, much of Arizona, the southwest corner of New Mexico, and a corridor extending as far south as Chihuahua in Mexico. Thereafter, the family split into a northern subfamily (Numic, Tubatulabal, Takic, and Hopi), which either stayed in place or drifted northward into the Great Basin, and a southern subfamily (Pimic, Taracahitic, Corachol, and Aztecan), which moved toward the Yucatán peninsula.

The relation of Uto-Aztecan to other American Indian language families is generally agreed upon, although it is far from having been worked out in detail. It clearly shares affinities, for example, to two other Central American language families, Tanoan and Oto-Manguean, but few linguists feel sure of further connections. In his controversial Language in the Americas (1987), Joseph H. Greenberg suggests that these three language families make up Central Amerind, one of six divisions of ancient Amerind, the primal language of the first migrants to the North American continent. Amerind, Greenberg suggests, may have split from northern Asian and European languages tens of thousands of years ago.

Characteristics

Like most other American Indian tongues, Uto-Aztecan languages are highly incorporative, or polysynthetic, and place verbs after subjects and objects in clauses. Verbs dominate sentences and can constitute sentences on their own. They do so because many grammatical functions that require separate words in, for example, European languages are blended into the Uto-Aztecan verb in the form of suffixes, prefixes, infixes, or vowel variation; these functions include subjective, objective, and reflexive pronouns and markers for tense, voice, mode, and direction. Thus, in classical Nahuatl, onikpix was a complete sentence meaning “I held it,” o- (past tense marker), ni- (“I”), k- (“it”), pix (“to have,” “to hold”).

Although there is much variation among the languages, common and proper nouns stand independent of the verbs; however, often a redundant pronoun may be inserted into the verb even when a subject or object noun is present. Under some circumstances one noun alone, with pronominal affixes, can make up a sentence: for example, classical Nahuatl tinopiltzin, “You are my son,” ti- (“you”), no- (“my”), pil- (“son”), -tzin (“reverential”).

The original Uto-Aztecan language appears to have had thirteen consonants—p, t, c, k, kw, s, h, m, n, l, w, y, and a glottal stop (a check to the airflow made in the back of the throat)—and five vowels: i, “barred” i, u, o, and a, each of which could be long or short. This reconstruction is based on comparisons of modern members of the family, in whose systems some of the sounds have disappeared or mutated.

Bibliography

Andrews, J. Richard. Introduction to Classical Nahuatl. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975.

Dayley, Jon P. Tümpisa (Panamint) Shoshone Grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Fowler, Catherine S. “Some Lexical Clues to Uto-Aztecan Prehistory.” International Journal of American Linguistics 49 (1983): 224-257.

Greenberg, Joseph H. Language in the Americas. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987.

Karttunen, Frances, and James Lockhart, eds. The Art of Nahuatl Speech: The Bancroft Dialogues. Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles, Latin American, Center Publications, 1987.

Miller, Wick R. “The Classification of the Uto-Aztecan Languages Based on Lexical Evidence.” International Journal of American Linguistics 50 (1984): 1-24.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Uto-Aztecan Cognate Sets. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Sapir, Edward. The Southern Paiute Language. 1930. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1984.

Steele, Susan. “Uto-Aztecan: An Assessment for Historical and Comparative Linguistics.” In The Languages of Native America, edited by Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979.