Hopi language
Hopi is an
Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the
Hopi people of northeastern
Arizona, 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.
Hopi has six vowels, written
a,
e,
i,
o,
u, and
ö. The first five are pronounced approximately as in the English words
want,
met,
pit,
off, and
put, while the last is roughly the same as in German (in the
IPA, they are respectively , /e/, /i/, /o/, , and ). All six vowels occur in long and short forms; long vowels are indicated in writing by doubling them.
The consonants of Hopi are (, spelled
v, is apparently both a phoneme in its own right as well as an intervocallic allophone of /p/):
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. In an article, "An American Indian Model of the Universe", he writes:::"The metaphysics underlying our own language, thinking and modern culture... imposes upon the universe two grand COSMIC FORMS, space and time; static three-dimensional infinite space, and kinetic one-dimensional uniformly and perpetually flowing time."Whorf says that the Hopi language expresses a different metaphysic altogether:::"It imposes upon the universe two grand cosmic forms, which... we may call MANIFESTED and MANIFESTING, or, again, OBJECTIVE and SUBJECTIVE"Other linguists and philosophers are skeptical of Whorf's argument, either in general, or in its particular application to the Hopi language.
*
Qatsi trilogy* Kennard, Edward A. and Albert Yava.
Field Mouse Goes to War: Tusan Homichi Tuwvöta. Palmer Lake, Colorado: Filter Press, 1999.
*
Hopi: Survey of an Uto-Aztecan Language*
Ethnologue entry on the Hopi language*
The Lord's Prayer in Hopi
