Shoshone language - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Shoshoni or Shoshone is a 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...

language spoken by the Shoshone

Shoshone

The Shoshone or Shoshoni are a Native American tribe in the United States with three large divisions: the Northern, the Western and the Eastern....

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 occupy areas of Wyoming

Wyoming

Wyoming is a state in the mountain region of the Western United States. The western two thirds of the state is covered mostly with the mountain ranges and rangelands in the foothills of the Eastern Rocky Mountains, while the eastern third of the state is high elevation prairie known as the High...

, Utah

Utah

Utah is a state in the Western United States. It was the 45th state to join the Union, on January 4, 1896. Approximately 80% of Utah's 2,763,885 people live along the Wasatch Front, centering on Salt Lake City. This leaves vast expanses of the state nearly uninhabited, making the population the...

, Nevada

Nevada

Nevada is a state in the western, mountain west, and southwestern regions of the United States. With an area of and a population of about 2.7 million, it is the 7th-largest and 35th-most populous state. Over two-thirds of Nevada's people live in the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which contains its...

, Idaho

Idaho

Idaho is a state in the Rocky Mountain area of the United States. The state's largest city and capital is Boise. Residents are called "Idahoans". Idaho was admitted to the Union on July 3, 1890, as the 43rd state....

and Montana

Montana

Montana is a state in the Western United States. The western third of Montana contains numerous mountain ranges. Smaller, "island ranges" are found in the central third of the state, for a total of 77 named ranges of the Rocky Mountains. This geographical fact is reflected in the state's name,...

. The number of people who speak Shoshoni has been steadily dwindling over the last few decades, so there are only a few hundred people who speak the language fluently today. A few thousand know it to one degree or another.

Shoshoni is the northernmost member of the large 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, which includes over thirty languages whose speakers originally inhabited a vast territory stretching from the Salmon River

Salmon River (Idaho)

The Salmon River is located in Idaho in the northwestern United States. The Salmon is also known as The River of No Return. It flows for through central Idaho, draining and dropping more than between its headwaters, near Galena Summit above the Sawtooth Valley in the Sawtooth National...

in central Idaho down into El Salvador

El Salvador

El Salvador or simply Salvador is the smallest and the most densely populated country in Central America. The country's capital city and largest city is San Salvador; Santa Ana and San Miguel are also important cultural and commercial centers in the country and in all of Central America...

. Shoshoni belongs to the Numic

Numic languages

Numic is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It includes seven languages spoken by Native American peoples traditionally living in the Great Basin, Colorado River basin, and southern Great Plains. The word Numic comes from the cognate word in all Numic languages for "person." For...

subbranch of Uto-Aztecan. The word Numic comes from the cognate word in all Numic languages for "person". For example, in Shoshoni the word is neme, in 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...

it is nümü, and in Southern Paiute the word is nuwuvi.

Morphology

Shoshoni is an agglutinative language, in which words, especially verbs, tend to be quite complex with several morpheme

Morpheme

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...

s strung together.

Vowels

Shoshoni has a typical Numic vowel

Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...

inventory of five vowels. In addition, there is the common diphthong

Diphthong

A diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...

ai, which varies rather freely with e, although certain morphemes always contain ai and others always contain e.

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

Consonants

Shoshoni has a typical Numic consonant

Consonant

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...

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
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

Phonology

Shoshoni stops (including the affricate) and nasals are voiced and lenited between vowels, are voiced in nasal-stop clusters, and are lenited (but not voiced) following h.

Short vowels are commonly devoiced word-finally and in unstressed syllables preceding /h/.

Writing System

There are two main spelling systems in use. The older system is the Crum-Miller system used in Miller 1972; and Crum & Dayley 1993 and 1997, and Crum, Crum, & Dayley 2001. The other system is the Idaho State University system and is used in Gould & Loether (2002). The Idaho State system is more phonetically based while the Crum-Miller is more phonemically based. Both systems use "e" to represent the vowel ɨ.

External links

Shoshoni Swadesh vocabulary list (Wiktionary)
Ethnologue report for Shoshoni
Portions of the Book of Common Prayer in Shoshoni Translated by Charles Lajoe and the Reverend John Roberts (Wind River Reservation, Wyoming: no publisher, 1899) digitized by Richard Mammana
Linguist List map of Shoshoni
Shoshoni Language Project at Idaho State University