The Luiseño language is a Uto-Aztecan language of California spoken by the Luiseño, a Native 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 mi from the southern part of Los Angeles County, California, to the northern part of San Diego County, California, and inland 30 mi. The people are called "Luiseño", owing to their proximity to the Mission San Luis Rey de Francia. The language went extinct in the early 2010's, but an active language revitalization project is underway, assisted by linguists from the University of California, Riverside. The Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians offers classes for children, and in 2013, "the tribe ... began funding a graduate-level Cal State San Bernardino Luiseño class, one of the few for-credit university indigenous-language courses in the country." In 2012, a Luiseño video game for the Nintendo DS was being used to teach the language to young people. Juaneño, the Luiseño dialect spoken by the Acjachemen, went extinct at an earlier date.

Linguistic documentation

Linguist John Peabody Harrington made a series of recordings of speakers of Luiseño in the 1930s. Those recordings, made on aluminum disks, were deposited in the United States National Archives. They have since been digitized and made available over the internet by the Smithsonian Institution.

Phonology

Vowels

Luiseño has ten vowel phonemes, five long and five short. Diphthongs include ey, ow and oow. Luiseño vowels have three lengths. Overlong vowels are rare in Luiseño, typically reserved for absolutes, such as interjections, e.g. aaashisha, roughly "haha!" (more accurately an exclamation of praise, joy or laughter).

Variants

For some native speakers recorded in The Sparkman Grammar of Luiseño, the allophones and are free variants of and respectively. However, other speakers do not use these variants. Sparkman records fewer than 25 Luiseño words with either or. For one of these words (ixíla "a cough") the pronunciations and are both recorded. Unstressed freely varies with. Likewise, unstressed and are free variants.

Vowel syncope

Vowels are often syncopated when attaching certain affixes, notably the possessive prefixes no- "my", cham- "o****ur", etc. Hence polóv "go****od", but o-plovi "yo****ur go****odness"; kichum "ho****uses" (nominative case), but kichmi "ho****uses" (accusative case).

Accent

A stress accent most commonly falls on the first syllable of a word. A single consonant between a stressed and unstressed vowel is doubled. Most are geminate, such as w and xw. However, some take a glottal stop instead: ch, kw , qw , ng , th , v , x (Elliot 1999: 14–16.) As a rule, the possessive prefixes are unstressed. The accent remains on the first syllable of the root word, e.g. no****kaamay "my son" and never nokaamay. One rare exception is the word pó-ha "alone" (< po- "his/her/its" + ha "self"), whose invariable prefix and fixed accent suggests tha**t it is now considered a single lexical item (compare noha** "myself", po*ha** "him/herself", etc.).

Consonants

Luiseño has a fairly rich consonant inventory.

Orthography

Along with an extensive oral tradition, Luiseño has a written tradition that stretches back to the Spanish 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. 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: Current orthography marks stress with an acute 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. koy oo wut "whale"; stress was not marked when it fell on the first syllable, e.g. hiicha "what" (currently híicha). 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 and Americanist phonetic notation.

Morphology

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

Sample texts

The Lord's Prayer (or the Our Father) in Luiseño, as recorded in The Sparkman Grammar of Luiseño.

Sources