Taos language
The Taos language of the Northern Tiwa branch of the Tanoan language family is spoken in Taos Pueblo, New Mexico.
Sociolinguistics
In data collected in 1935 and 1937, George L. Trager notes that Taos was spoken by all members of the Taos Pueblo community. Additionally, most speakers were bilingual in either Spanish or English: speakers over 50 years of age were fluent in Spanish, adult speakers younger than 50 spoke Spanish and English, children around 5 years old could speak English but not Spanish—generally a decrease in age correlated with a decrease in Spanish fluency and an increase in English fluency. Pre-school children and a few very old women were monolingual Taos speakers.A more recent report by Gomez notes that the language "until a few years ago remained viable only in age groups of thirty and older", a sign that Taos is being affected by language endangerment pressures. Nonetheless, it is one of 46 languages in North America that are being spoken by significant numbers of children as of 1995. The most recent estimate is from 1980 with about 800 native speakers out of 1600 ethnic population.
Taos speakers have historically been reluctant to provide linguists with language data to work with and have preferred to keep their language secret from outsiders. G. Trager had to work with his consultants in private and keep their identities in confidence. The tendency for secrecy is a continuing general Pueblo reaction starting in the 17th century in large part due to the oppressive persecution of Pueblo religious practices by the colonial Spanish. The Taos community has been particularly guarded about revealing their language to outsiders when compared with other eastern pueblos in New Mexico. Due to secrecy practices, the details of language preservation are not known outside of the community.
Language variation
George L. Trager found no dialectal variation in the 1930 and 1940s.Genealogical relations
Taos belongs to a northern sub-grouping on the Tiwa branch of the Tanoan language family. It is closely related to and partly mutually intelligible with Picurís. It is slightly more distantly related to Southern Tiwa.History
In July 2012, Taos Pueblo, which "does not formally encourage persons outside the tribe to learn their language" hosted a Tiwa Language Festival for tribal members to keep Tiwa from "going to sleep". The Cultural Education Committee hopes to incorporate the Tiwa language into Head Start in the fall.Sounds
According to one analysis, Taos has 18 consonants:The alveolar flap is found in loanwords from New Mexican Spanish.
Taos has six vowels—five of these have an oral-nasal contrast. Taos has five vowel clusters.
Taos has three degrees of stress: primary, secondary, and unstressed, as well as three tones: high, mid, and low.
Transcription
Taos has been transcribed by Trager in Americanist phonetic notation. However, his transcription differs between his earlier work exemplified by Trager and his later work following and explained in Trager. The following chart lists the symbolization of Taos phonemes in Trager and Trager and also a corresponding IPA symbolization. However, the chart only lists symbols that differ between the three—if Trager, Trager, and the IPA all use the same symbol it is not listed in the chart below.Both Trager and Trager use the same vowel symbolization. This symbols have roughly approximate values of corresponding IPA symbols except that the vowel transcribed as by Trager is phonetically IPA and in Trager's phonemic categorizing a low back vowel.
More different is Trager's two ways of transcribing tone and stress. The table below shows the differences on the syllable ta.
The conflation between primary + high and secondary + high as well as primary + low and secondary + low in Trager was due to the belief that they were in complementary distribution. Trager rescinded this view in Trager and onward. In Trager's terminology, primary stress is called "loud" stress, secondary stress is "normal", and unstressed is "weak".
The orthography used in this article is essentially that of Trager with one modification: Trager mentioned that the glottal stop ’ was not written when word-initial in the practical orthography he was teaching his informants—this practice is followed here.
Grammar
Nouns
Taos nouns are inflected according to grammatical number with the number suffixes. Additionally, they may be inflected for possession with prefixes that indicate the number and grammatical person of the possessor as well as agreeing with the number of noun stem.Number inflection
Nouns are generally composed of a noun stem with a following number suffix. The number suffixes distinguish between singular and plural. However, in verbs, three numbers are distinguished—singular, dual, and plural—because of this distinction in verbs the plural suffixes on nouns are more appropriately duoplural. The singular suffix is ‑na and the duoplural suffix is ‑ne.Two other number suffixes ‑ną and ‑nemą can express either singular number or duoplural depending upon the grammatical class of noun. For example, the noun stem cupa‑ "judge" is duoplural with the addition of ‑ną: cùpáną "judges". On the other hand, the noun stem t’awa‑ "wheel" is singular with the addition of ‑ną: t’áwaną "wheel". Examples with ‑nemą include ká‑nemą "mothers" and cí‑nemą "eye". Following the terminology used for other Tanoan languages, these will be called here "inverse" number suffixes. These inverse suffixes effectively indicate the grammatical number opposite the other suffix that appears on a given noun. Thus, since the stem p’iane‑ "mountain" requires the plural suffix ‑ne in the duoplural form, the inverse ‑nemą marks the singular in p’íane‑nemą "mountain". And, likewise, since the stem cibiki‑ "robin" requires the singular suffix ‑na in the singular form, the inverse ‑ną marks the duoplural in cìbíki‑ną "robins".
Number classes
Taos nouns can be grouped into four grammatical classes based on which number affixes are required for the singular and duoplural inflectional forms. Trager calls these noun classes "genders". One class requires the singular suffix ‑na in the singular form and an inverse suffix in the duoplural. Another class requires an inverse suffix in the singular and the duoplural suffix ‑ne in the duoplural. A third class requires the singular and duoplural suffixes for the singular and duoplural forms, respectively. A fourth class only occurs with the duoplural suffix ‑ne. The first two classes, which use an inverse suffix, can be separated into two subclasses based on whether inverse ‑ną or ‑nemą is used. These are summarized in the following table.Noun class I is composed of primarily animate nouns. The animate nouns include persons, animals, and kinship terms. Two non-animate nouns in the class are c’ìpána "doll" and p’ȍxwíana "egg". The class includes both native words and loanwords from Spanish. Membership of this class is represented by the following list of nouns. The first list uses the ‑ną inverse suffix in the duoplural.
The following belong to noun class I with the ‑nemą inverse suffix.
Nouns in classes II and III are opposed to class I in that they are inanimates. However, there is no apparent semantic motivation for distinguishing the types of nouns with membership in class II and class III. Both classes include body parts, plants, natural phenomena, and man-made materials. Loanwords are incorporated into both classes. Examples of nouns in class II follow. Those with the ‑ną inverse suffix are below.
Examples of nouns in class II with the ‑nemą inverse suffix are below.
Examples of noun in class III are the following:
The final class IV consists of mostly abstract and deverbal nouns. All nouns in this class only are inflected with the duoplural. They may be semantically either singular or collective. Examples follow.
Trager treats class III and IV as sub-classes of a larger single class.
The noun class system also applies to some other word types besides nouns. Demonstratives and some numerals are also inflected for number with different suffixes that agree with the noun that they modify.
Connecting -e-
When some stems are followed by the number suffixes, they are followed by a connecting ‑e‑ vowel. For example, the word "flower" consists of a stem pob‑ and in the inflected forms the intervening vowel appears: pȍb‑é‑nemą "flower". Other examples include ȍd‑é‑nemą "chin, jaw", kwían‑e‑na "bitch", łȉw‑é‑na "woman". However, not all instances of e vowels occurring directly before number suffixes are this intervening vowel as there also some stems which end in a e vowel, such as c’ȕné‑na "coyote" which has the stem c’ùne‑.Reduplication
Several noun stem have reduplicated stem material appearing between the stem and the number suffix. For example, kò’óne "washing" consists of the stem ko‑ and the duoplural number suffix ‑ne. Between the stem and the suffix is the duplifix ‑’o‑. This duplifix consists of the consonant ’ and a copy of the final vowel of the stem ko‑. The duplifix may be symbolized as ‑’V‑ where V represents the reduplication of any vowel that occurs at the end of the preceding noun stem.Thus "washing" is ko‑’V‑ne, which after copying is ko‑’o‑ne. Other examples include
Further details about the phonology of the reduplication are found in Taos phonology: Reduplicative vowel patterning.
The reduplication occurs in all four noun classes before the all number suffixes except inverse ‑ną. The following examples show the patterning of reduplication and number suffixes found by Trager.