Kitanemuk language

Kitanemuk
Native to	United States
Region	Southern California
Ethnicity	Kitanemuk
Extinct	Last spoken in the 1940s by Marcelino Rivera, Isabella Gonzales, and Refugia Duran
Language family	Uto-Aztecan Serran Kitanemuk
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)
Linguist list	qe8
Glottolog	None

Kitanemuk was a Northern Uto-Aztecan language of the Serran branch. It was very closely related to Serrano, and may have been a dialect. It was spoken in the San Gabriel Mountains and foothill environs of Southern California. The last speakers lived some time in the 1940s, though the last fieldwork was carried out in 1937. J. P. Harrington took copious notes in the 1916 and 1917, however, which has allowed for a fairly detailed knowledge of the language.

Morphology

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

Phonology

Consonants

The consonant phonemes of Kitanemuk, as reconstructed by Anderton (1988) based on Harrington's field notes, were (with some standard Americanist phonetic notation in ⟨angle brackets⟩:

	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar		Glottal
				plain	labio.
Nasal	/m/	/n/		/ŋ/
Plosive	/p/	/t/		/k/	/kʷ/	/ʔ/
Affricate		/ts/ ⟨c⟩	/tʃ/ ⟨č⟩
Fricative	/v/	/s/	/ʃ/ ⟨š⟩			/h/
Rhotic		/r/
Approximant		/l	/j/ ⟨y⟩		/w/

Word-finally, /h/ becomes [r], and all voiced consonants become voiceless before other voiceless consonants or word-finally.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i	ɨ	u
Mid	e		o
Open		a

See also

• Population of Native California
• Native American history of California
• Classification of Native Americans in California

References

• Anderton, Alice J. (1988). The Language of the Kitanemuks of California. PhD. diss., University of California, Los Angeles.
• Mithun, Marianne (1999). The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

External links

• Four Directions Institute: Kitanemuk
• Native Languages: Kitanemuk
• Kitanemuk language overview at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
• Papers of John P. Harrington, Part 3, Southern California/Basin, OLAC Open Language Archive

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