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| Luiseño | |
|---|---|
| Luiseño–Juaneño | |
| Chamꞌteela | |
| Native to | United States |
| Region | SouthernCalifornia |
| Ethnicity | 2,500Luiseño andJuaneño (2007)[1] |
| Extinct | early 2010s[1] |
| Revival | 2010s |
| Dialects |
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | lui |
| ISO 639-3 | lui |
| Glottolog | luis1253 |
| ELP | Luiseño |
 | |
 Luiseño is classified as Critically Endangered by theUNESCOAtlas of the World's Languages in Danger.[2] | |
| This article containsIPA phonetic symbols. Without properrendering support, you may seequestion marks, boxes, or other symbols instead ofUnicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA. | |
Luiseño, orChamtéela, is aUto-Aztecan language ofCalifornia spoken by theLuiseño people.[3] The Luiseño are aNative American people who at the time of first contact with the Spanish in the 16th century inhabited the coastal area of southern California, ranging 50 miles (80 km) from the southern part ofLos Angeles County, California, to the northern part ofSan Diego County, California, and inland 30 miles (48 km). The people are called "Luiseño", owing to their proximity to theMission San Luis Rey de Francia.
The language wentextinct in the early 2010's,[1] but an activelanguage revitalization project is underway,[4] assisted by linguists from theUniversity of California, Riverside.[5] ThePechanga Band of Luiseño Indians offers classes for children, and in 2013, "the tribe ... began funding a graduate-levelCal State San Bernardino Luiseño class, one of the few for-credit university indigenous-language courses in the country."[6] In 2012, a Luiseño video game for theNintendo DS was being used to teach the language to young people.[7][8]
LinguistJohn Peabody Harrington made a series of recordings of speakers of Luiseño in the 1930s. Those recordings, made onaluminum disks, were deposited in theUnited States National Archives.[9] They have since been digitized and made available over the internet by theSmithsonian Institution.[10]
Luiseño has ten vowelphonemes, five long and five short.[11]
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | ɪiː | ʊuː | |
| Mid | ɛeː | ɔɔː | |
| Open | aaː |
Diphthongs includeey[ej],ow[ow] andoow[oːw].
Luiseño vowels have three lengths.
Overlong vowels are rare in Luiseño, typically reserved for absolutes, such asinterjections, e.g.aaashisha, roughly "haha!" (more accurately an exclamation of praise, joy or laughter).
For some native speakers recorded inThe Sparkman Grammar of Luiseño, theallophones[ə] and[ɨ] arefree 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.
Vowels are oftensyncopated when attaching certainaffixes, notably the possessive prefixesno- "my",cham- "our", etc. Hencepolóv "good", buto-plovi "your goodness";kichum "houses" (nominative case), butkichmi "houses" (accusative case).
Astress accent most commonly falls on the firstsyllable of a word.
A single consonant between a stressed and unstressed vowel is doubled. Most are geminate, such asw[wː] andxw[xːʷ]. However, some take a glottal stop instead:ch[ʔt͜ʃ],kw[ʔkʷ],qw[ʔqʷ],ng[ŋʔ],th[ðʔ],v[vʔ],x[xʔ] (Elliott 1999: 14–16.)
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 wordpó-ha "alone" (<po- "his/her/its" +ha "self"), whose invariable prefix and fixed accent suggests that it is now considered a singlelexical item (comparenoha "myself",poha "him/herself", etc.).
Luiseño has a fairly richconsonant inventory.
| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m[m] | n[n] | ng[ŋ] | |||||
| Plosive | voiceless | p[p] | t[t] | ch[tʃ] | k[k], kw[kʷ] | q[q], qw[qʷ] | ꞌ[ʔ] | |
| voiced | (b[b]) | (d[d]) | (g[ɡ]) | |||||
| Fricative | voiceless | (f[f]) | s[s̪] | [note 1][s̺] | sh[ʃ] | x[x] ~[χ], xw[xʷ] | h[h] | |
| voiced | v[v] | th[ð] | ||||||
| Approximant | l[l] | y[j] | w[w] | |||||
| Rhotic | r[ɾ] ~[r] | |||||||
Along with an extensiveoral tradition, Luiseño has a written tradition that stretches back to theSpanish settlement of San Diego.Pablo Tac (1822–1841), a native Luiseño speaker and Mission Indian, was the first to develop an orthography for his native language while studying in Rome to be a Catholic priest.[12] His orthography leaned heavily on Spanish, which he learned in his youth. Although Luiseño has no standardized spelling, a commonly accepted orthography is implemented in reservation classrooms and college campuses in San Diego where the language is taught.
The alphabet taught in schools is:[13]
Currentorthography marks stress with anacute accent on the stressed syllable's vowel, e.g.chilúy "speak Spanish",koyóowut "whale". Formerly, stress might be marked on both letters of a long vowel, e.g.koyóówut, or by underlining, e.g.koyoowut "whale"; stress was not marked when it fell on the first syllable, e.g.hiicha "what" (currentlyhíicha). The marking of word-initial stress, like the marking of predictable glottal stop, is a response to language revitalization efforts.
The various orthographies that have been used for writing the language show influences from Spanish, English andAmericanist phonetic notation.
| IPA | Pablo Tac (1830s) | Sparkman (1900) | other recent | Modern |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| (Long vowel, e.g./iː/) | ii | iꞏ | ii | |
| /tʃ/ | cꞌ | č | ch | |
| /ʃ/ | sꞌ | š | sh | |
| /q/ | qꞌ | q | q | |
| /ʔ/ | ꞌ | ʔ | ꞌ | |
| /x/ | j | x | x | |
| /ð/ | δ | ð | th | |
| /ŋ/ | nꞌ | ŋ | ñ | ng |
| /j/ | y | y | y | |
| /s̺/ | z | (s̸)[note 1] |
![[icon]](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=https%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3aWiki_letter_w_cropped.svg) | This sectionneeds expansion. You can help byadding missing information.(April 2025) |
Luiseño is anagglutinative language, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with severalmorphemes strung together.
TheLord's Prayer (or the Our Father) in Luiseño, as recorded inThe Sparkman Grammar of Luiseño.
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