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, Snake River basin, and southern Great Plains. The word Numic comes from the cognate word in all Numic languages for "person.", which reconstructs to Proto-Numic as /*nɨmɨ/. For example, in the three Central Numic languages and the two Western Numic languages it is /nɨmɨ/. In Kawaiisu it is /nɨwɨ/ and in Colorado River /nɨwɨ/, /nɨŋwɨ/ and /nuu/. These languages are classified in three groups: Central Numic languages Comanche Timbisha (a dialect chain with main regional varieties being Western, Central, and Eastern) Shoshoni (a dialect chain with main regional varieties being Western, Gosiute, Northern, and Eastern) Southern Numic languages Kawaiisu Colorado River (a dialect chain with main regional varieties being Chemehuevi, Southern Paiute, and Ute) Western Numic languages Mono (two main dialects: Eastern and Western) Northern Paiute (a dialect chain with main regional varieties being Southern Nevada, Northern Nevada, Oregon, and Bannock) Apart from Comanche, 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, Shoshoni, and Colorado River). 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, 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. A mitochondrial DNA study from 2001 supports 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.

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Related concepts (2)

Ute people

Ute ('juːt) are the Indigenous people of the Ute tribe and culture among the Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin. They had lived in sovereignty in the regions of present-day Utah and Colorado in the Southwestern United States for many centuries until Europeans settled on their lands. The state of Utah is named after the Ute tribe. In addition to their ancestral lands within Colorado and Utah, their historic hunting grounds extended into current-day Wyoming, Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Comanche

The Comanche kəˈmæntʃi or Nʉmʉnʉʉ (Nʉmʉnʉʉ, "the people") are a Native American tribe from the Southern Plains of the present-day United States. Comanche people today belong to the federally recognized Comanche Nation, headquartered in Lawton, Oklahoma. The Comanche language is a Numic language of the Uto-Aztecan family. Originally, it was a Shoshoni dialect, but diverged and became a separate language. The Comanche were once part of the Shoshone people of the Great Basin.