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Concept
Tewa language
Summary
Tewa (tewa) is a Tanoan language spoken by some Pueblo people, mostly in the Rio Grande valley in New Mexico north of Santa Fe, and in Arizona. It is also known as Tano, or Tée-wah (archaic). There is some disagreement among the Tewa people about whether or not Tewa should have a written form, as some Pueblo elders believe that their language should be preserved by oral tradition alone. Because of this, it was not until the 1960s that the language was written down for the first time. However, many Tewa speakers have decided that Tewa literacy is an important aspect in passing down the language and so orthographies have been created for this purpose.
The language has struggled to maintain a healthy speaker base; however, because of efforts to preserve the language starting in the 1980s—both by native speakers and linguists—this problem is not as dire as it for some other indigenous languages.
Tewa has a fairly large phoneme inventory with 45 distinct individual sounds. Twelve of these are vowels, which can be either long or short. Tewa, like other Tanoan languages, also makes use of tones, of which it has four.
The 1980 census counted 1,298 speakers, almost all of whom are bilingual in English.
Today, the Endangered Languages Project estimates a total of 1,500 speakers worldwide, with 1,200 of them in the New Mexico pueblos and 300 in the Arizona village of Hano. Of these speakers, few are fluent with the vast majority being semi-speakers, and only in a few places, like Hano, are children acquiring Tewa. The largest New Mexico pueblo, San Juan, there are only 30 fluent speakers left as of 2008.
As of 2012, Tewa is defined as "severely endangered" in New Mexico by UNESCO.
In the names "Pojoaque" and "Tesuque", the element spelled "que" (pronounced something like [ɡe] in Tewa, or /ki/ in English) is Tewa for "place".
Tewa can be written with the Latin script; this is occasionally used for such purposes as signs (Be-pu-wa-ve, "Welcome", or sen-ge-de-ho, "Bye").
Official source
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