Ethnicity Yokut | ISO 639-3 (included in yok) | |
Glottolog vall1251 (Valley Yokuts)yoku1256 (Yokuts (Yawelmani)) | ||
Valley Yokuts is a dialect cluster of the Yokutsan language family of California.
Contents
- Varieties
- Sounds
- Vowels
- Syllable phonotactics
- vowel shortening
- vowel harmony
- vowel epenthesis
- Grammar
- References
Chukchansi, which is still spoken natively, has language classes and a preschool for children. It is also taught at a local elementary school. Though there are no longer any native speakers, Tachi has a Headstart language program.
Varieties
Valley Yokuts is sometimes considered three languages, of which only Northern Valley Yokuts is still spoken.
Of these, Yawelmani /jɑːwɛlˈmɑːni/, also known as Yowlumni, is the best known. See also Chukchansi dialect.
Sounds
Yawelmani will be taken as representative.
Vowels
Yawelmani has 8 vowel phonemes:
As can be seen, Yawelmani vowels have a number of different realizations (phones) which are summarized below:
Syllable & phonotactics
The Yawelmani syllables can be either a consonant-vowel sequence (CV), such as deeyi- 'lead', or a consonant-vowel-consonant sequence (CVC), such as xata- 'eat'. Thus the generalized syllable is the following:
CV(C)Word roots are bisyllabic and have either one of two shapes:
vowel shortening
When long vowels are in closed syllables, they are shortened:
vowel harmony
Yawelmani has suffixes that contain either an underspecified high vowel /I/ or an underspecified non-high vowel /A/.
vowel epenthesis
Yawelmani adds vowels to stems, when suffixes with an initial consonant are affixed to word with two final consonants in order to avoid a triple-consonant-cluster.