Umatilla language

Use and revitalization efforts

As of 2013, there are about 50 first language speakers of Umatilla. The language is taught at the Nixyaawii Community School. "There are six full-time language instructors in CTUIR (Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation). Nixyaawii Community School has offered Umatilla, Walla Walla and Nez Perce language classes for the last decade and a Cay-Uma-Wa Head Start program is being developed to reach children while they’re young. There are also online video resources and the Tamaluut immersion school, a new language immersion program for three- to five-year-olds." The Wíyat'ish Naknúwit "For the Future" Language Project, has trained speakers using a Master-Apprentice program. A Flash Story Camp has been held by First Nations Development in collaboration with Tamastslikt's Language Enhancement Program and Education Department, and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. In 2015, Umatilla instruction will be given at the high school level. There is interest in adapting a curriculum for Umatilla that has been used successfully for Okanagan Salish at the Salish School of Spokane.

The Umatilla Dictionary was published in 2014 with the University of Washington Press. The Dictionary documents the language of the Umatilla people east of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon and Washington. Working for many years with the accumulated scholarship of linguists and anthropologists as well as with elders on the Umatilla Reservation, tribal linguist Noel Rude has painstakingly recorded words, pronunciations, phrases, and other elements of the Umatilla language. The dictionary includes a grammar and comparative information that places the Umatilla language in its linguistic and historical context and compiles all of its known words, phrases, and constructions. Umatilla Dictionary is an important work for people of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Yakama Nation, and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and adds to the growing linguistic work being done by tribes and scholars on endangered languages.

Phonology

Rigsby and Rude use a technical alphabet based upon the Americanist phonetic notation to transcribe Umatilla, though other practical orthographies also exist.

Vowels

All long vowels are written as clusters of identical short vowels.

Vowels of different quality never appear in clusters. Allowed diphthongs are the following: /ay aay aw aaw iw iiw uy uuy/.

Consonants

Consonant clusters are common and show few restrictions. All words begin with a consonant, even though according to orthographic conventions, an initial glottal stop before a vowel is not written and initial unstressed /ʼɨ/ is not written before /m n l/ plus a consonant. Initial clusters of up to three consonants are allowed (pccák 'pepper'), medials of up to five consonants and finals of up to four consonants (látx̣tx̣ 'ashes'). Clusters of identical consonants also occur: qqápni 'silly', ččù 'quiet'. The laryngeals /h ʼ/ usually occur in initial position and sometimes in intervocalic position.

Syllable structure

As yet, no detailed description of syllable structure in Umatilla Sahaptin has been written.

Stress

Primary stress is distinctive and is indicated by an acute accent. It occurs on one syllable of a word. Stress contrast can be seen in the following examples: ámapa 'husband' (objective case) and amápa 'island' (locative case); páqʼinušana 'he saw him' and paqʼínušana 'they saw (him)'. Nondistinctive secondary and lesser stresses occur phonetically and are conditioned by phonetic and syntactic environments.

Phonological processes

Alternation in the phonetic shapes of morphemes is frequent and most often vocalic.

Vocalic alternations result from processes (ablaut, epenthesis and truncation) that can be morphologically or phonologically conditioned.

Consonantal alternations arise from two processes: velar stops /k kʼ/ may palatalize to /c č/ and affricates /c č/ become /t/ before /s š/. For instance, /c/ + /š/ becomes /t/ + /š/.

Morphology

The morphological structure of Umatilla and other Sahaptin dialects is synthetic to mildly polysynthetic.
The processes used are clisis, reduplication, ablaut, compounding, suppletion, order and the most common one is affixation (suffixation in particular).
Nouns, adjectives and pronouns inflect for number and case. There are three number categories: singular, dual and plural. The singular is not marked. The dual is marked by the suffix -in (with allomorphs -win, -yn or -n depending on the final). There are two main ways to mark the plural: with the suffix -ma (tílaaki-ma 'women") and by full or partial reduplication (pšwá 'stone', pšwápšwa 'stones'). These two markers can sometimes co-exist in the same word. Several nouns feature irregular plural marks that might have been more widely used in the past, such as the prefix a- and the suffix -tu.
Verbs have the most complex morphology of all the parts of speech. Their internal structure is characterized by three major positions:

1) the pronominal prefix
This position is not necessarily occupied, it depends on the aspects of sentence structure external to the verb.

2) the theme
It can be composed of one or several elements. Theme-derivational processes include notions such as the distribution of action and the iteration of action which is expressed by the reduplication of a part of or the totality of the theme (i-ƛúp-ƛúp-ša 'he keeps on jumping up and down', where ƛúp means 'to jump'). Affixations of adverbial notions also occur: qá- 'suddenly', máy- 'in the morning, twá- 'with the edge of a long object', tísɨm- 'while sitting'.

3) the auxiliary suffix complex
Its inflectional system marks the verbs for:

Syntax

Umatilla, like other varieties of Sahaptin, is characterized by a free word order and a complex case-marking system.

Noun case endings