O'odham language

Dialects

The O'dham language has a number of dialects.

Due to the paucity of data on the linguistic varieties of the Hia C-eḍ O'odham, this section currently focuses on the Tohono O'odham and Akimel O'odham dialects only.

The greatest lexical and grammatical dialectal differences are between the Tohono O'odham (or Papago) and the Akimel O'odham (or Pima) dialect groupings. Some examples:

There are other major dialectal differences between northern and southern dialects, for example:

The Cukuḍ Kuk dialect has null in certain positions where other Tohono O'odham dialects have a bilabial:

Morphology

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

Phonology

For clarity, note that the terms Tohono O'odham and Papago refer to the same language; likewise for Akimel O'odham and Pima. O'odham phonology has a typical Uto-Aztecan inventory distinguishing 21 consonants and 5 vowels.

Consonants

The retroflex consonants are apical postalveolar.

Vowels

All vowels distinguish three degrees of length: long, short, and extra-short.

Papago /ɨ/ is pronounced /ʌ/ in Pima.

Additionally, in common with many northern Uto-Aztecan languages, vowels and nasals at end of words are devoiced. Also, a short schwa sound, either voiced or unvoiced depending on position, is often interpolated between consonants and at the ends of words.

Allophony and distribution

Orthography

There are two orthographies commonly used for the O'odham language: Alvarez–Hale and Saxton. The Alvarez–Hale orthography is officially used by the Tohono O'odham Nation and the Salt River Pima–Maricopa Indian Community, and is used in this article, but the Saxton orthography is also common and is official in the Gila River Indian Community. It is relatively easy to convert between the two, the differences between them being largely no more than different graphemes for the same phoneme, but there are distinctions made by Alvarez–Hale not made by Saxton.

The Saxton orthography does not mark word-initial /ʔ/ or extra-short vowels. Final ⟨i⟩ generally corresponds to Hale–Alvarez ⟨ĭ⟩ and final ⟨ih⟩ to Hale–Alvarez ⟨i⟩:

Etymological or phonetic spelling?

There is some disagreement among speakers as to whether the spelling of words should be only phonetic or whether etymological principles should be considered as well.

For example, oamajda vs. wuamajda ("frybread"; some people may also use a c instead of a j), oam means "yellow/brown/orange" and thus is a compound word of sorts. Some people believe it should begin like any word that starts with a /ʊa/, wua, while others think its spelling should match that of the word oam (oam is in fact a form of s-oam, so while it could be spelled wuam itself, it is not since it is just a different declension of the same word) to reflect its etymology.

Syntax

O'odham has relatively free word order within clauses; for example, all of the following sentences mean "the boy brands the pig":

In principle, these could also mean "the pig brands the boy", but such an interpretation would require an unusual context.

Despite the general freedom of sentence word order, O'odham is fairly strictly verb-second in its placement of the auxiliary verb (in the above sentences, it is ʼo):

Verbs

Verbs are inflected for aspect (imperfective cipkan, perfective cipk), tense (future imperfective cipkanad), and number (plural cicpkan). Number agreement displays absolutive behavior: verbs agree with the number of the subject in intransitive sentences, but with that of the object in transitive sentences:

The main verb agrees with the object for person (ha- in the above example), but the auxiliary agrees with the subject: ʼa:ñi ʼañ g kokji ha-cecposid "I am branding the pigs".

Nouns

Three numbers are distinguished in nouns: singular, plural, and distributive, though not all nouns have distinct forms for each. Most distinct plurals are formed by reduplication and often vowel loss plus other occasional morphophonemic changes, and distributives are formed from these by gemination of the reduplicated consonant:

Adjectives

O'odham adjectives can act both attributively modifying nouns and predicatively as verbs, with no change in form.

Sample text

The following is an excerpt from Oʼodham Piipaash Language Program: Taḏai. It exemplifies the Salt River dialect.

In Saxton orthography: