Colorado River Numic language

Colorado River Numic (also called Ute /ˈjuːt/ YOOT, Southern Paiute /ˈpaɪjuːt/ PIE-yoot, Ute–Southern Paiute, or Ute-Chemehuevi /ˌtʃɛmɪˈweɪvi/ CHEH-mih-WAY-vee), of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family, is a dialect chain that stretches from southeastern California to Colorado. Individual dialects are Chemehuevi, which is in danger of extinction, Southern Paiute (Moapa, Cedar City, Kaibab, and San Juan subdialects), and Ute (Central Utah, Northern, White Mesa, Southern subdialects). According to the Ethnologue, there were a little less than two thousand speakers of Colorado River Numic Language in 1990, or around 40% out of an ethnic population of 5,000.

Colorado River Numic
Southern Paiute
Native toUnited States
RegionNevada, California, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico
Ethnicity6,200 Chemehuevi, Southern Paiute and Ute (2007)
Native speakers
920 (2007)
20 monolinguals (1990 census)
Uto-Aztecan
  • Numic
    • Southern Numic
      • Colorado River Numic
Dialects
  • Chemehuevi
  • Southern Paiute
  • Ute
Language codes
ISO 639-3ute
Glottologutes1238
ELPUte
Chemehuevi is classified as Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger

The Southern Paiute dialect has played a significant role in linguistics, as the background for a famous article by linguist Edward Sapir and his collaborator Tony Tillohash on the nature of the phoneme.

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