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Language Lineage

Northern Uto-Aztecan

The Uto-Aztecan languages of the United States (Numic, Hopi, Takic and Tübatulabal), grouped together in most classifications, though whether they share an ancestor is disputed.

c. 2nd millennium BCE – presentThe Great Basin, southern California, the Colorado Plateau and the southern Plains
On this page
  1. A Grouping in Question
  2. Small Languages, Long Efforts
  3. Where its languages are spoken
  4. Turning points
  5. Contested classifications

01

A Grouping in Question

The Northern Uto-Aztecan languages are spread from the deserts of southern California across the Great Basin and onto the Colorado Plateau, and, through the Comanche, onto the southern Plains. Their speakers ranged from Great Basin foragers to the maize-farming Hopi of the Arizona mesas.

Whether they form a genuine branch is disputed. Wick Miller's lexical counts grouped them together, but critics argue that they are simply the northern branches that stayed close to one another, sharing features through contact.

02

Small Languages, Long Efforts

Every Uto-Aztecan language north of the Mexican border is endangered. Hopi is by far the largest, with several thousand speakers, but fewer children now learn it at home. The Numic languages are spread over a huge area in many small communities, and many of them have only a few hundred fluent speakers, most of them elderly. In the Takic languages of southern California the break came earliest, under the missions, and fluent first-language speakers are now very few or gone.

These communities have also been at the centre of some of the best-known work on language revival in North America. In California, where dozens of Native languages are in the same position, the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival began the Master-Apprentice programme in the 1990s with the linguist Leanne Hinton. It pairs an elderly speaker with a younger learner who spend many hours a week together using only the language, and it has since been copied across the continent. Comanche and other Numic communities have produced dictionaries and teaching materials of their own. Tribes now largely direct this work themselves, and linguists increasingly work for them rather than only on their languages.

On the map

Where its languages are spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. United StatesNumic A few thousand at most · Hopi c. 6,800 · Tübatulabal · Takic Very few

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Splitc. 2nd millennium BCEContested

    Numic, Hopi and Takic diverge

    The northern Uto-Aztecan languages separate into Numic in the Great Basin, Hopi on the Colorado Plateau and Takic in southern California. The dates are rough estimates.

    Sources (1)
    • Miller, Wick R. 1984. The classification of the Uto-Aztecan languages based on lexical evidence. International Journal of American Linguistics 50(1).

Outside the tree

Contested classifications

These disagreements may never be settled. Each position is given with its grounds, and no side is declared correct.

  • Widely accepted

    Northern Uto-Aztecan

    Numic, Hopi, Takic and Tübatulabal share one ancestor within the family

    Evidence for

    Lexical studies such as Miller's (1984) group these languages together, and most classifications, including Glottolog, draw a Northern branch.

    Evidence against

    Few sound changes are shared by all four and no others, and several scholars see the shared vocabulary as the result of long contact among neighbours in the American West. Some treat the northern groups as separate branches of Uto-Aztecan.

    Sources (2)
    • Miller, Wick R. 1984. The classification of the Uto-Aztecan languages based on lexical evidence. International Journal of American Linguistics 50(1).
    • Campbell, Lyle. 1997. American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.