Luiseño language

Morphology

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

Vowels

Luiseño has five vowel phonemes.

Variants

For some native speakers recorded in The Sparkman Grammar of Luiseño, the allophones [ə] and [ɨ] are free variants of [e] and [i] respectively. However, other speakers do not use these variants. Sparkman records fewer than 25 Luiseño words with either [ə] or [ɨ]. For one of these words (ixíla “a cough”) the pronunciations [əxɨla] and [ɨxɨla] are both recorded.

Unstressed [u] freely varies with [o]. Likewise, unstressed [i] and [e] are free variants.

Vowel syncope

Vowels are often syncopated when attaching certain affixes, notably the possessive prefixes no- “my”, cham- “our”, etc. Hence polóv “good”, but o-plovi “your goodness”; kichum “houses” (nominative case), but kichmi “houses” (accusative case).

Vowel length

Luiseño distinguishes vowel length quantitatively. Luiseño vowels have three lengths.

Short: The basic vowel length. In writing, this is the standard value of a given vowel, e.g. ⟨a⟩.

Long: The vowel is held twice as long but with no change in quality. In writing, a long vowel is often indicated by doubling it, e.g. ⟨aa⟩.

Overlong: The vowel is held three times as long but with no change in quality. In writing, an overlong vowel is indicated by tripling it, e.g. ⟨aaa⟩.

Overlong vowels are rare in Luiseño, typically reserved for absolutes, such as interjections, e.g. aaashisha, roughly “haha!” (more accurately an exclamation of praise, joy or laughter).

Accent

A stress accent regularly falls on the first syllable of a word. In Luiseño, stress is fixed and is not contrastive.

Many orthographies mark irregular stress with an acute accent on the stressed syllable’s vowel, e.g. chilúy “speak Spanish”. In these systems, irregularly stressed long vowels either carry a written accent on both vowels or the first vowel only, e.g. koyóówut or koyóowut “whale”. Also, stress is not visually represented when it falls on the first syllable, e.g. hiicha “what”.

Another convention is to mark stress by underlining accented vowels, e.g. koyoowut “whale”.

As a rule, the possessive prefixes are unstressed. The accent remains on the first syllable of the root word, e.g. nokaamay “my son” and never *nokaamay. One rare exception is the word pó-ha “alone” (< po- “his/her/its” + ha “self”), whose invariable prefix and fixed accent suggests that it is now considered a single lexical item (compare noha “myself”, poha “him/herself”, etc.).

Consonants

Luiseño has a fairly rich consonant inventory.

/f/ and /ɡ/ are found only in borrowed words, principally from Spanish and English.

Both [ʃ] and [tʃ] are found in word initial position. However, only [ʃ] occurs intervocalically, and only [ʃ] is found preconsonantally and at word final position. Examples of these allophones in complementary distribution abound, such as ya’ásh ('man nom.') and ya’áchi ('man acc.').

Spelling systems

Along with an extensive oral tradition, Luiseño has a written tradition that stretches back to the Spanish settlement of San Diego. Pablo Tac (1822–1841), a native Luiseño speaker and a convert to Roman Catholicism, was the first to develop an orthography for his native language. His orthography leaned heavily on Spanish, which he learned in his youth.

Although Luiseño has no standard orthography, a commonly accepted spelling is implemented in reservation classrooms and college campuses in San Diego where the language is taught. The various orthographies that have been used for writing the language show influences from Spanish, English and the IPA.

Sample texts

The Lord's Prayer (or the Our Father) in Luiseño, as recorded in The Sparkman Grammar of Luiseño:

Cham-na’ tuupaña aaukat cham-cha oi ohó’vanma. Toshño om chaami. Loví’i om hish mimchapun ivá’ ooxñ tuupaña axáninuk. Ovi om chaamik cham-naachaxoni choun teméti. Maaxaxan-up om chaamik hish aláxwichi chaam-lo’xai ivianáninuk chaam-cha maaxaxma pomóomi chaami hish pom-lo’xai aláxwichi. Tuusho kamíí’i chaami chaam-lo’xai hish hichakati. Kwavcho om chaami. Our-father / sky-in / being / we / you / believe / always. Command / you / us. Do / you / anything / whatever / here / earth-on / sky-in / as. Give / you / us-to / our-food / every / day. Pardon / you / us-to / anything / bad / our-doing / this as /we / pardon / them / us / anything / their-doing / bad. Not / allow / us / our-doing / anything / wicked. Care / you / us.

Linguistic documentation

Linguist John Peabody Harrington made a series of recordings of speakers of Luiseño in the 1930s. Those recordings, made on aluminum disks, were deposited in the United States National Archives. They have since been digitized and made available over the internet by the Smithsonian Institution.