Cupeño language facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Cupeño
Kupangaxwicham Pe'me̲melki
Region	Southern California, United States
Ethnicity	Cupeño people
Extinct	1987, with the death of Roscinda Nolasquez
Language family	Uto-Aztecan Northern Uto-Aztecan Takic Cupan Cahuilla–Cupeño Cupeño
Writing system	Latin
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Cupeño is an extinct Uto-Aztecan language, formerly spoken by the Cupeño people of Southern California, United States. Roscinda Nolasquez (d. 1987) was the last native speaker of Cupeño, the Cupeño people now speak English. The native name Kupangaxwicham means 'people from the sleeping place' referring to their traditional homeland, prior to 1902, of Ktipa (at the base of Warner's Hot Springs). A smaller village was located to the South of Ktipa, named Wildkalpa.

Throughout the 1890s it was debated whether or not the Cupeño peoples should be allowed to continue living on traditional Cupeño territory. After many years of public protests the California Supreme Court decided to relocate the Cupeño people to the Pala Reservation.

Cupeño has linguistic influence from both the languages before it and the Yuman-speaking lpai who shared a Southern border with them.

Region

The language was originally spoken in Cupa, Wilaqalpa, and Paluqla, San Diego County, California, and later around the Pala Indian Reservation.

Morphology

Cupeño is an agglutinative language, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several morphemes strung together. Cupeño is dominantly head-final, with a mostly strict word order (SOV) for some constituents, e.g. genitive-noun constructions. But some contexts allow departure from the SOV word order, this may include shifting verbs to be the initial part of a sentence or moving arguments to follow verbs.

Nouns

Nouns (as well as demonstratives, determiners, quantifiers, and adjectives) in Cupeño are marked for case and number and agree with each other in complex nominal constructions.

Verbs

Cupeño inflects its verbs for transitivity, tense, aspect, mood, person, number, and evidentiality.

Evidentiality is expressed in Cupeño with clitics, which generally appear near the beginning of the sentence. =ku'ut 'reportative' (mu=ku'ut 'and it is said that...') =am 'mirative' =$he 'dubitative'

There are two inflected moods, realis =pe and irrealis =e'p.

Tense-Aspect system

Future simple verbs are unmarked. Past simple verbs have past-tense pronouns; past imperfect add the imperfect modifier shown below.

Pronouns

The pronominals of Cupeño appear in many different forms and structures. The following appear attached only to past-tense verbs.

Phonology

Vowels

/ɛ/ and /o/ appear largely in Spanish loanwords, but also as allophones of /ə/ in native Cupeño words.

/i/ can also be realized as [ɪ] in closed syllables, and [e] in some open syllables.

/u/ may reduce to schwa in unstressed syllables.

/ə/ also appears as [ɨː] when long and stressed, [o] after labials and [q], and as [ɛ] before [w].

/a/ is also realized as [ɑ] before uvulars.

Consonants

Lexicon

See also

In Spanish: Idioma cupeño para niños