Yaqui language
Encyclopedia
Yaqui locally known as Yoeme or Yoem Noki, is a Native American language of the Uto-Aztecan family. It is spoken by about 15,000 people, mostly of the border Yaqui people, in the region around the Mexican
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

 state of Sonora
Sonora
Sonora officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Sonora is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 72 municipalities; the capital city is Hermosillo....

, and Arizona
Arizona
Arizona ; is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States. It is also part of the western United States and the mountain west. The capital and largest city is Phoenix...

 in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

.

Phonology

The remarks below use the orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...

 used by the Pascua Yaqui Tribe
Pascua Yaqui Tribe
The Pascua Yaqui Tribe is a tribe of Native Americans, acknowledged by the United States government on September 18, 1978.Most U.S. members of the tribe live in southern Arizona. Descended from the ancient Uto-Azteca people of Mexico, the ancestors of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe first settled in the...

 in the United States. There are also several orthographic systems used in Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

 differing slightly from this, mainly in using Spanish language
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 values for several consonants and Spanish language spelling rules [e.g., "rohikte" would be written "rojicte"]. There are minor differences between Mexican and US dialects in inclusion or exclusion of sounds, most notably the US dialects tend to exclude an intervocalic "r" and final "k".

It is important to bear in mind that Yaqui, although it has been written for almost 500 years, is a language of an oral culture
Orality
Orality is thought and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy are unfamiliar to most of the population. The study of orality is closely allied to the study of oral tradition...

. The Yaqui language uses much subtlety in facial expression, gesture, and cultural context that cannot be economically conveyed in writing - and "Phonology" is quite inadequate a heading for the basic building block of Yaqui oral communication.

Vowels

Yaqui vowels are pronounced very much like they are in standard Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

:

"A" is pronounced similarly to that in (American English
American English
American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....

) "father" (International Phonetic Alphabet
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...

 (IPA) /a/).

"E" is pronounced similarly to that in (Am. Eng.) "get" (IPA /e/).

"I" is pronounced similarly to that in (Am. Eng.) "machine" (IPA /i/).

"O" is pronounced similarly to that in (Am. Eng.) "go" (IPA /o/).

"U" is pronounced similarly to that in (Am. Eng.) "rude" (IPA /u/).

Vowels may be either short or long in duration. Often, long vowels are reduced in length when the word they are used in is used constructively, e.g., 'maaso' ('deer') is shortened to 'maso' in 'maso bwikam' ('deer songs'). Long vowels are written by doubling the vowel. Long vowels may change tone
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...

, and this is not represented in the written language. Some writers have referred to Yaqui as being a tonal language, but the modern forms of the language do not show any widespread and significant use of tonemes.

Consonants

The following consonantal sounds are present in Yaqui: b, ch, (d), (f), (g), h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, and y. Most of them are pronounced nearly the same as they are in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, although "p", "t", and "k" are not aspirated
Aspiration (phonetics)
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ...

. In the IPA, they are respectively /b t͡ʃ (d) (f) (ɡ) h k l m n p r s t β w j/. Many Yaqui speakers make no difference between b and v, pronouncing both as /β/, and this appears to be intrinsic to the language and not an influence of Spanish. Additionally, there are two consonants written as clusters: "bw" (IPA /bʷ/) and "kt" (IPA /k͡t/), "bw" being a rounded "b" ('bwikam') and "kt" a simultaneous articulation of "k" and "t" ('rohikte'). The "kt" sound is found in many other Uto-Aztecan languages. Pronunciation of the rounded "b" as "b"+"w" and the "kt" as "k"+"t" is acceptable, but non-native.

Note that "d", "f", and "g" are present only in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 and Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 loanword
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...

s. Often they are substituted with the native sounds "t"/"r"/"l", "p", and "w"/"k", respectively.

In Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

, many speakers will often substitute "g" for syllable-initial "w". This is largely because the phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

 /w/ is not present in northern Mexican Spanish as an independent consonantal phoneme, but rather as either a variant of the vowel /u/ or as an adjunct to /g/ and /k/. Use of "g" in place of "w" is considered by Yaqui speakers as a Mexicanism
Mexicanism
Mexicanism may be:*a linguistic feature peculiar to Mexican Spanish*Mexican patriotism, especially among expatriate Mexican Americans, see Chicano Movement*a New Age spiritual movement, see Antonio Velasco Piña...

 and not as standard Yaqui usage even in Mexico.

Glottal Stops

Yaqui also features glottal stop
Glottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...

s (IPA /ʔ/). These stops are represented by an apostrophe
Apostrophe
The apostrophe is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet or certain other alphabets...

.

There also appears to be a "fainter" glottal stop sometimes used between vowels but with apparently little predictability. Whether this is phonemic or not is still unclear.

Sound Symbolism

Sound symbolism
Sound symbolism
Sound symbolism or phonosemantics is a branch of linguistics and refers to the idea that vocal sounds have meaning. In particular, sound symbolism is the idea that phonemes carry meaning in and of themselves.-Origin:...

 is present in Yaqui. For example, a word with the letter “l” in it may either be pronounced normally, to denote approval from the speaker, or with an “r” in place of the “l” to denote disapproval or disfavor on the part of the speaker. Either variant form is correct.

Devoicing

Devoicing occurs at the ends of phrases. This is especially notable with the sound “m” and with vowels. Yaqui speech often has a “breathy” sound to English speakers.

Gestures

One word, laute, has two contradictory meanings: “quickly” and “slowly.” (Similar to the problem encountered with the English word “mercurial,” which can mean either “unhesitating” or “scatter-brained.”) The word is often accompanied with a quick or slow open-handed movement to indicate the meaning. (Alternatively, laute could be translated as “at a different rate of speed” which requires a hand gesture to indicate the nature of the difference when needed for clarification.)

Syntax

Yaqui word order is generally subject–object–verb.

The object of a sentence is suffixed with “-t,” or, if the word already ends in “t,” with “-a.”

Here is a simple sentence: “Inepo huuhit vichnu”, or “I am looking at the woman.”
Inepo huuhit vichnu
I woman look at

Case

Yaqui is a "noun-heavy" agglutinative language. Nouns and pronouns are often declined in ways that may be strange to Western learners.

For example, the first person singular pronoun "in" or "ne" (which varies by dialect), is more often used in the form "inepo", which can be translated "within me". The "-(e)po" ending is quite common and seems to denote much more than simple physical inclusion.

Nouns

Plural nouns are formed by adding the suffix "-im", or "-m" if the noun ends in a vowel.
  • Tekil - Job
  • Tekilim - Jobs


If a plural noun is the object of a sentence, the suffixation of "-t" or "-ta" is not used.
Inepo huuhim vichnu
I women look at

Verbs

Usually, adding the suffix "-k" to a verb indicates past tense, though there are many exceptions. If a verb ends in a diphthong, "-kan" is added. If a verb ends in "-i", "-akan" is added. If a verb ends in "-o" or "-u", "-ekan" is added, and if a verb ends in "-a", "-ikan" is added. If a verb ends in "-k", "-an" is added.

Regularly, "-ne" indicates the future.

Adjectives

In Yaqui, adjectives very often act as verbs (in Afro-Asiatic linguistics, they would be called stative verbs). For instance, "vemela" or "new", would most often be used to mean "is new". Adjectives have tenses, the same as verbs.

Reduplication

Reduplication
Reduplication
Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word is repeated exactly or with a slight change....

 is present in Yaqui.
Reduplicating the first syllable of a verb indicates habitual action:
  • eta - shuts
  • e'eta - usually shuts


Primary reduplication is also used to pluralize adjectives.

Reduplicating the second consonant of a verb is used to show that an action is performed rarely.

Sample Words and Phrases

  • o'ow - man
  • hamut - woman
  • tu'i hiapsek - kind (lit. "good hearted")
  • halla'i - friend
  • maaso - deer
  • aamu - to hunt

  • aman ne tevote em yevihnewi - "I extend my greetings"


Greetings often are very formal. The following formula of four phrases is often used even among close friends:
  • Lios em chania - "Greetings!" (to one person, to more than one: Lios em chaniavu) (lit. "God preserves you!", Lios [sometimes pronounced Lioh] is a very early borrowing of the Spanish "Dios")
  • Lios em chiokoe - (the reply to the above, lit. "God pardons you!")
  • Empo allea - "May you rejoice!" (lit. "In you happy", 'allea' is said to be from the Spanish 'alegre', meaning 'happy')
  • Kettu'i - "How kind!"

Kinship Terminology

Immediate family Male Female
Mother Ae Ae
Father Achai Hapchi
Older Brother Sai Avachi
Younger Brother Saila Wai
Older Sister Ako Ako
Younger Sister Wai Wai

Extended family Father's Mother's
Grandmother Namuli Namuli
Grandfather Hamuli Hamuli
Mother Haaka Asu
Father Havoi Apa
Older Brother Haavi Kumui
Younger Brother Samai Taata
Older Sister Ne'esa Chi'ila
Younger Sister Nana Mamai

External links

  • Yaqui Vocabulary List (from the World Loanword Database)
  • Yaqui Swadesh vocabulary list from Wiktionary
  • Report on Yaqui from the Ethnologue
    Ethnologue
    Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International , a Christian linguistic service organization, which studies lesser-known languages, to provide the speakers with Bibles in their native language and support their efforts in language development.The Ethnologue...

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