HOPI LANGUAGE

'Hopi' is an Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Hopi people of northeastern Arizona, USA, although today some Hopi are monolingual English speakers.
The use of the language gradually declined over the course of the 20th century. In 1990, it was estimated that over 5,000 other people could speak Hopi natively, at least 40 of them monolingual.
Despite the fact that relatively few people can speak Hopi, it is very unlikely that it will face the danger of extinction in the near future, as the language is making a comeback. Many Hopi children are being raised in the language, a comprehensive Hopi-English dictionary has been published, and a group called the Hopi Literacy Project has focused its attention on promoting the language.

Contents

Phonology

Metaphysics

See also

Notes

Bibliography

External links

Phonology

Hopi has six vowels, written 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u', and 'ö'. The first five are pronounced approximately as in the English words ''par'', ''pet'', ''pit'', ''pore'', and ''put'', while the last is roughly the same as in German (in the IPA, they are respectively , , , , , and ). All six vowels occur in long and short forms; long vowels are indicated in writing by doubling them.
The consonants of Hopi are

	Labial	Dental	Palatal	Retroflex	Velar			Uvular		Glottal
					Palatalized	Plain	Labialized	Plain	Labialized
Stop
Affricate
Voiceless Fricative
Voiced Fricative
Nasal
Approximant

(, spelled ''v'', is apparently both a phoneme in its own right as well as an intervocallic allophone of /p/.)

Metaphysics

Benjamin Lee Whorf, a well-known linguist, used the Hopi language to exemplify his argument that one's world-view is affected by one's language and vice-versa. Among Whorf's most astounding claims was that Hopi had “no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions or that refer directly to what we call “time”.”^[1] However, other linguists and philosophers are skeptical of Whorf's argument, and his findings on Hopi have been disputed or rejected.^[2]

See also

★ Qatsi trilogy

Notes

1. Carroll, John B. (ed.)(1956). ''Language Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf''. MIT Press, Boston, Massachusetts. ISBN 0262730065 9780262730068
2. Setting the Record Straight About Native Languages: Language Complexity

Bibliography

★ Hopi Dictionary Project (University of Arizona Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology). ''Hopi Dictionary : Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni: A Hopi-English Dictionary of the Third Mesa Dialect With an English-Hopi Finder List and a Sketch of Hopi Grammar'', University of Arizona Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8165-1789-4

★ Kennard, Edward A. and Albert Yava. ''Field Mouse Goes to War: Tusan Homichi Tuwvöta''. Palmer Lake, Colorado: Filter Press, 1999.

External links

★ Hopi: Survey of an Uto-Aztecan Language

★ Ethnologue entry on the Hopi language