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Mono language (California)

Native American language of California

Summary

Native American language of California

Field	Value
name	Mono
states	United States
region	California
ethnicity	Mono and Owens Valley Paiute
speakers	41
ref
date	1994, Mono
familycolor	Uto-Aztecan
fam2	Northern
fam3	Numic
fam4	Western
iso3	mnr
glotto	mono1275
glottorefname	Mono (USA)
map	File:Mono map.svg
map2	Lang Status 20-CR.svg
mapcaption2
speakers2	50 (1994, Owens Valley Paiute)
dia1	Mono
dia2	Owens Valley Paiute

Mono ( ) is a Native American language of the Numic group of Uto-Aztecan languages, the ancestral language of the Mono people. Mono consists of two dialects, Eastern and Western. The name "Monachi" is commonly used in reference to Western Mono and "Owens Valley Paiute" in reference to Eastern Mono. It is spoken in the southern Sierra Nevada, the Mono Basin, and the Owens Valley of central-eastern California. Mono is most closely related to Northern Paiute; these two are classified as the Western group of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family.

Western Mono

Story in Mono recorded by the [[UCLA Phonetics Lab]] in 1984

The number of Native speakers in 1994 ranged from 37 to 41. The majority of speakers are from the Northfork Rancheria and the community of Auberry. The Big Sandy Rancheria and Dunlap have from 12 to 14 speakers. The Northfork Mono are developing a dictionary, and both they and the Big Sandy Rancheria provide language classes. While not all are completely fluent, about 100 members of Northfork have "some command of the language." In the late 1950s, Lamb compiled a dictionary and grammar of Northfork Mono. The Western Mono language has a number of Spanish loanwords dating to the period of Spanish colonization of the Californias, as well as loanwords from Yokuts and Miwok.

Owens Valley Paiute

In the mid-1990s, an estimated 50 people spoke the Owens Valley Paiute language, also known as Eastern Mono. Informal language classes exist and singers keep native language songs alive. Linguist Sydney Lamb studied this language in the 1950s and proposed the name Paviotso, but that was not widely adopted.

Phonemes

Vowels

front	central	back	High	Non-High

Vowel length is also evenly distributed among the dialects.

Consonants

Below is given the consonant phoneme inventory of Northfork Western Mono and Owens Valley Paiute as presented by Lamb (1958) and Liljeblad & Fowler (1986).

Bilabial	Coronal	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal	plain		lab.	plain		lab.	Nasal	Plosive	Affricate	Fricative	Semivowel

Bilabial	Coronal	Palatal	Velar	Glottal	plain		lab.	Nasal	Plosive	Affricate	Fricative	Semivowel

Geminated sounds of plosives, nasals and fricatives are also evenly distributed.

Suprasegmental

Lamb (1958) also described four suprasegmental features that he ascribed phonemic status.

Morphology

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

References

Sources

References

"UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in danger".
[https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~survey/languages/mono.php "Mono."] ''Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley.'' 2009-2010 (retrieved 6 May 2010)
The Handbook of Indians of California, by A. L. Kroeber (1919) says that the Owens Valley Paiutes are Northern Paiute or Mono/Bannock.

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

mono-people agglutinative-languages numic-languages indigenous-languages-of-california indigenous-languages-of-the-north-american-great-basin endangered-uto-aztecan-languages native-american-language-revitalization

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