Numic is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language

Uto-Aztecan languages

Uto-Aztecan or Uto-Aztekan is a Native American language family consisting of over 30 languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found from the Great Basin of the Western United States , through western, central and southern Mexico Uto-Aztecan or Uto-Aztekan is a Native American language family...

 family. It includes seven languages spoken by Native American

Native Americans in the United States

Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...

 peoples traditionally living in the Great Basin

Great Basin

The Great Basin is the largest area of contiguous endorheic watersheds in North America and is noted for its arid conditions and Basin and Range topography that varies from the North American low point at Badwater Basin to the highest point of the contiguous United States, less than away at the...

, Colorado River

Colorado River

The Colorado River , is a river in the Southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, approximately long, draining a part of the arid regions on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. The watershed of the Colorado River covers in parts of seven U.S. states and two Mexican states...

 basin, and southern Great Plains

Great Plains

The Great Plains are a broad expanse of flat land, much of it covered in prairie, steppe and grassland, which lies west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada. This area covers parts of the U.S...

. The word Numic comes from the cognate word in all Numic languages for "person." For example, in the three Central Numic languages and the two Western Numic languages it is /nɨmɨ/. In Kawaiisu

Kawaiisu language

The Kawaiisu language is an Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Kawaiisu people of California.-Classification:Kawaiisu is a member of the Southern Numic division of the Uto-Aztecan language family.-Linguistic Environment:...

 it is /nɨwɨ/ and in Colorado River /nɨwɨ/, /nɨŋwɨ/ and /nuu/.

Classification

These languages are classified in three groups:

• Central Numic languages
  • Comanche
    Comanche language
    Comanche is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Comanche people, who split off from the Shoshone soon after they acquired horses in around 1705...
    
    
  • Timbisha
    Timbisha language
    The Timbisha language is the language of the Native American people who have inhabited the region in and around Death Valley, California and the southern Owens Valley since late prehistoric times...
    
     (a dialect chain with main regional varieties being Western, Central, and Eastern)
  • Shoshoni
    Shoshone language
    Shoshoni or Shoshone is a Native American language spoken by the Shoshone people. Principal dialects of Shoshoni include Western Shoshoni in Nevada, Gosiute in western Utah, Northern Shoshoni in southern Idaho and northern Utah, and Eastern Shoshoni in Wyoming.Shoshoni-speaking Native Americans...
    
     (a dialect chain with main regional varieties being Western, Gosiute, Northern, and Eastern)
• Southern Numic languages
  • Kawaiisu
    Kawaiisu language
    The Kawaiisu language is an Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Kawaiisu people of California.-Classification:Kawaiisu is a member of the Southern Numic division of the Uto-Aztecan language family.-Linguistic Environment:...
    
    
  • Colorado River (a dialect chain with main regional varieties being Chemehuevi, Southern Paiute, and Ute)
• Western Numic languages
  • Mono
    Mono language (Native American)
    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....
    
     (two main dialects: Eastern and Western)
  • Northern Paiute
    Northern Paiute language
    Northern Paiute is a Western Numic language of the Uto-Aztecan family, which according to Marianne Mithun had around 500 fluent speakers in 1994. Ethnologue reported the number of speakers in 1999 as 1,631...
    
     (a dialect chain with main regional varieties being Southern Nevada, Northern Nevada, Oregon, and Bannock)

Apart from Comanche

Comanche

The Comanche are a Native American ethnic group whose historic range consisted of present-day eastern New Mexico, southern Colorado, northeastern Arizona, southern Kansas, all of Oklahoma, and most of northwest Texas. Historically, the Comanches were hunter-gatherers, with a typical Plains Indian...

, each of these groups contains one language spoken in a small area in the southern Sierra Nevada and valleys to the east (Mono, Timbisha, and Kawaiisu), and one language spoken in a much larger area extending to the north and east (Northern Paiute, Shoshone, and Ute-Southern Paiute). Some linguists have taken this pattern as an indication that Numic speaking peoples expanded quite recently from a small core, perhaps near the Owens Valley

Owens Valley

Owens Valley is the arid valley of the Owens River in eastern California in the United States, to the east of the Sierra Nevada and west of the White Mountains and Inyo Mountains on the west edge of the Great Basin section...

, into their current range. This view is supported by lexicostatistical studies. Fowler's reconstruction of Proto-Numic ethnobiology also points to the region of the southern Sierra Nevada as the homeland of Proto-Numic approximately two millennia ago. Recent mitochondrial DNA

Mitochondrial DNA

Mitochondrial DNA is the DNA located in organelles called mitochondria, structures within eukaryotic cells that convert the chemical energy from food into a form that cells can use, adenosine triphosphate...

 studies have supported this linguistic hypothesis. The anthropologist Peter N. Jones thinks this evidence to be of a circumstantial nature, but this is a distinctly minority opinion among specialists in Numic.

The Comanche split off from the Shoshone soon after they acquired horses around 1705. The Comanche language and the Shoshone language are quite similar although certain low-level consonant changes in Comanche have inhibited mutual intelligibility.

Vowels

Proto-Numic had an inventory of five vowels.

	front	back unrounded	back rounded
High	*i	*ɨ	*u
Non-High		*a	*o

Consonants

Proto-Numic had the following consonant inventory:

	Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...	Coronal Coronal consonant Coronal consonants are consonants articulated with the flexible front part of the tongue. Only the coronal consonants can be divided into apical , laminal , domed , or subapical , as well as a few rarer orientations, because only the front of the tongue has such...	Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...	Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....	Labialized velar	Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
Stop Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...	*p	*t		*k	*kʷ	*ʔ
Affricate Affricate consonant Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :...		*ts
Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...		*s				*h
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...	*m	*n		*ŋ	(*ŋʷ)
Semivowel Semivowel In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel is a sound, such as English or , that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary rather than as the nucleus of a syllable.-Classification:...			j		w

In addition to the above simple consonants, Proto-Numic also had nasal-stop/affricate clusters and all consonants except *s, *h, *j, and *w could be geminated. Between vowels short consonants were lenited.

Major Central Numic Consonant Changes

The major difference between Proto-Central Numic and Proto-Numic was the phonemic split of Proto-Numic geminate consonants into geminate consonants and preaspirated consonants. The conditioning factors involve stress shifts and are complex. The preaspirated consonants surfaced as voiceless fricatives, often preceded by a voiceless vowel.

Shoshoni and Comanche have both lost the velar nasals, merging them with *n or turning them into velar nasal-stop clusters. In Comanche, nasal-stop clusters have become simple stops, but p and t from these clusters do not lenite intervocalically. This change postdates the earliest record of Comanche from 1786, but precedes the 20th century. Geminated stops in Comanche have also become phonetically preaspirated.

Major Southern Numic Consonant Changes

Proto-Southern Numic preserved the Proto-Numic consonant system fairly intact, but the individual languages have undergone several changes.

Modern Kawaiisu has reanalyzed the nasal-stop clusters as voiced stops, although older recordings preserve some of the clusters. Geminated stops and affricates are voiceless and non-geminated stops and affricates are voiced fricatives. The velar nasals have fallen together with the alveolar nasals.

The dialects of Colorado River east of Chemehuevi have lost *h. The dialects east of Kaibab have collapsed the nasal-stop clusters with the geminated stops and affricate.

Major Western Numic Consonant Changes

Proto-Western Numic changed the nasal-stop clusters of Proto-Numic into voiced geminate stops. In Mono and all dialects of Northern Paiute except Southern Nevada, these voiced geminate stops have become voiceless.

Sample Numic Cognate Sets

The following table shows some sample Numic cognate sets that illustrate the above changes. Forms in the daughter languages are written in a broad phonetic transcription rather than a phonemic transcription that sometimes masks the differences between the forms. Italicized vowels and sonorants are voiceless.

	Mono Mono language (Native American) 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....	Northern Paiute Northern Paiute language Northern Paiute is a Western Numic language of the Uto-Aztecan family, which according to Marianne Mithun had around 500 fluent speakers in 1994. Ethnologue reported the number of speakers in 1999 as 1,631...	Timbisha Timbisha language The Timbisha language is the language of the Native American people who have inhabited the region in and around Death Valley, California and the southern Owens Valley since late prehistoric times...	Shoshoni Shoshone language Shoshoni or Shoshone is a Native American language spoken by the Shoshone people. Principal dialects of Shoshoni include Western Shoshoni in Nevada, Gosiute in western Utah, Northern Shoshoni in southern Idaho and northern Utah, and Eastern Shoshoni in Wyoming.Shoshoni-speaking Native Americans...	Comanche Comanche language Comanche is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Comanche people, who split off from the Shoshone soon after they acquired horses in around 1705...	Kawaiisu Kawaiisu language The Kawaiisu language is an Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Kawaiisu people of California.-Classification:Kawaiisu is a member of the Southern Numic division of the Uto-Aztecan language family.-Linguistic Environment:...	Colorado River Ute language Colorado River Numic , of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family, is a dialect chain that stretches from southeastern California to Colorado...
*hoa 'hunt, trap'	hoa	hoa	hɨwa	hɨa	hɨa	hɨa	oa (SP) 'spy'
*jaka 'cry'	jaɣa	jaɣa	jaɣa	jaɣai	jake	jaɣi	jaɣa
*kaipa 'mountain'	kaiβa	kaiβa				keeβi	kaiβa
*kuttsu 'bison'	kuttsu	kuttsu 'cow'	kwittʃu 'cow'	kuittʃun 'cow'	kuhtsu 'cow'		kuttsu
*naŋka 'ear'	nakka	nakka naɡɡa (So Nev)	naŋɡa	naŋɡi	naki	naɣaβiβi	naŋkaβɨ (Ch) nakka- (Ut)
*oppimpɨ 'mesquite'			oɸimbɨ	oɸi 'mesquite bean'		oβi(m)bɨ	oppimpɨ (Ch)
*paŋkʷi 'fish'	pakkʷi	pakkʷi paɡɡʷi (So Nev)	paŋŋʷi	paiŋɡʷi	pekʷi
*puŋku 'pet, dog'	pukku	pukku puɡɡu (So Nev) 'horse'	puŋɡu 'pet'	puŋɡu 'horse'	puku 'horse'	puɣu	puŋku (Ch) pukku (Ut) 'pet'
*tɨpa 'pine nut'	tɨβa	tɨβa	tɨβa	tɨβa		tɨβattsi	tɨβa
*woŋko 'pine'	wokkoβɨ	wokkoppi .oɡɡoppi (So Nev)	woŋɡoβi	woŋɡoβin	wokoβi	woɣo- (only in compounds)	oɣompɨ