Zuni language

Zuni is a language of the Zuni people, indigenous to western New Mexico and eastern Arizona in the United States. It is spoken by around 9,500 people, especially in the vicinity of Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, and much smaller numbers in parts of Arizona.
Unlike most indigenous languages in the United States, Zuni is still spoken by a significant number of children and, thus, is comparatively less threatened with language endangerment. Edmund Ladd reported in 1994 that Zuni is still the main language of communication in the pueblo and is used in the home.
The Zuni name for their own language, Shiwiʼma can be translated as "Zuni way", whereas its speakers are collectively known as ʼA:shiwi.

Classification

Zuni is considered a language isolate. The Zuni have, however, borrowed a number of words from Keres, Hopi, and O’odham pertaining to religion and religious observances.
A number of possible relationships of Zuni to other languages have been proposed by various researchers, although none of these have gained general acceptance. The main hypothetical proposals have been connections with Penutian, Tanoan, and Hokan phyla, and also the Keresan languages.
The most clearly articulated hypothesis is Newman's connection to Penutian, but even this was considered by Newman to be a tongue-in-cheek work due to the inherently problematic nature of the methodology used in Penutian studies. Newman's cognate sets suffered from common problems in comparative linguistics, such as comparing commonly borrowed forms, forms with large semantic differences, nursery forms, and onomatopoetic forms. Zuni was also included under Morris Swadesh's Penutioid proposal and Joseph Greenberg's very inclusive Penutian sub-grouping – both without convincing arguments.
Zuni was included as being part of the Aztec-Tanoan language family within Edward Sapir's heuristic 1929 classification. Later discussions of the Aztec-Tanoan hypothesis usually excluded Zuni.
Karl-Heinz Gursky published problematic unconvincing evidence for a Keresan-Zuni grouping. J. P. Harrington wrote one unpublished paper with the title "Zuñi Discovered to be Hokan".

Language contact

As Zuni is a language in the Pueblo linguistic area, it shares a number of features with Hopi, Keresan, and Tanoan that are probably due to language contact. The development of ejective consonants in Zuni may be due to contact with Keresan and Tanoan languages which have complete series of ejectives. Likewise, aspirated consonants may have diffused into Zuni. Other shared traits include: final devoicing of vowels and sonorant consonants, dual number, ceremonial vocabulary, and the presence of a labialized velar .

Phonology

The 16 consonants of Zuni are the following:
The vowels are the following:
Zuni syllables have the following specification:

Morphology

Word order in Zuni is fairly free with a tendency toward SOV. There is no case-marking on nouns. Verbs are complex, compared to nouns, with loose incorporation. Like other languages in the Southwest, Zuni employs switch-reference.
Newman classifies Zuni words according to their structural morphological properties, not according to their associated syntactic frames. His terms, noun and substantive, are therefore not synonymous.

Pronouns

Zuni uses overt pronouns for first and second persons. There are no third person pronouns. The pronouns distinguish three numbers and three cases. In addition, some subject and possessive pronouns have different forms depending on whether they appear utterance-medially or utterance-finally. All pronoun forms are shown in the following table:
There is syncretism between dual and plural non-possessive forms in the first and second persons. Utterances with these pronouns are typically disambiguated by the fact that plural pronouns agree with plural-marked verb forms.

Sociolinguistics

storytelling – Tedlock
ceremonial speech – Newman
slang – Newman

Names

Zuni adults are often known after the relationship between that adult and a child. For example, a person might be called "father of so-and-so", etc. The circumlocution is used to avoid using adult names, which have religious meanings and are very personal.

Orthography

There are twenty letters in the Zuni alphabet.

Double consonants indicate geminate sounds, for instance the in shiwayanne "car", is pronounced.
Long vowels are indicated with a colon following the vowel as the in wa'ma:we "animals".
is not part of the alphabet, although the digraph is. There are also other two-letter combination sounds.
are not used to write Zuni, except for the occasional borrowed word.
indicates IPA .
indicates IPA – it is written medially and finally but not word-initially.

This orthography was largely worked out by Curtis Cook.

Old orthographies

Linguists and anthropologists have created and used their own writing system for Zuni before the alphabet was standardized. One was developed for Zuni by linguist Stanley Newman. This practical orthography essentially followed Americanist phonetic notation with the substitution of some uncommon letters with other letters or digraphs. A further revised orthography is used in Dennis Tedlock's transcriptions of oral narratives.
See the table below for a comparison of the systems.

Tedlock	Newman	Americanist	Current orthography	IPA
mm	mm	mm	mm
n	n	n	n
nn	nn	nn	nn
o	o	o	o
oo	o:	oˑ	o:
p	p	p	p
pp	pp	pp	pp
s	s	s	s
ss	ss	ss	ss
sh	sh	š	sh
ssh	shsh	šš	shh
t	t	t	t
tt	tt	tt	tt
ts	z	c	ts
tts	zz	cc	tts
u	u	u	u
uu	u:	uˑ	u:
w	w	w	w
ww	ww	ww	ww
y	y	y	y
yy	yy	yy	yy

In Newman's orthography, the symbols, replaced Americanist .
Tedlock's orthography uses instead of Newman's except at the beginning of words where it is not written. Additionally, in Tedlock's system, long vowels are written doubled instead of with a length mark as in Newman's system and and are used instead of and. Finally, Tedlock writes the following long consonants – – with a doubled initial letter instead of Newman's doubling of the digraphs –,, – and and are used instead of Newman's and.