Native to United States, Mexico | Ethnicity Kumeyaay | |
Region California, Baja California Native speakers (undated figure of 100) Language family Yuman
Core Yuman
Delta–California
Tiipai ISO 639-3 dih (as part of Diegueño) | ||
Tiipai (Tipay) is a Native American language spoken by a number of Kumeyaay (Kumiai) tribes in northern Baja California and southern San Diego County, California. It is also known as Southern Diegueño. Hinton (1994:28) provided a "conservative estimate" of 200 Tipai speakers in the early 1990s; the number of speakers has declined steadily since that time.
Tipai belongs to the Yuman language family and to the Delta–California branch of that family. In the past, Tipai and its neighbors to the north, Kumeyaay and Ipai, have been considered dialects of a single Diegueño language, but linguists now recognize that they represent at least three distinct languages (for discussion, see Langdon 1990). Tipai itself is not a uniform speech variety, and some suggest that it might be possible to recognize multiple languages within Tipai (Laylander 1985:33; Mithun 1999:577).
Published documentation of the Tipai language includes a descriptive grammar (Miller 2001), a comparative dictionary (Miller and Langdon 2008), a word list (Meza and Meyer 2008), and texts (Hinton 1976, Hinton 1978, see also Miller 2001:331-348).