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 in total, especially in the vicinity of Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, and much smaller numbers in parts of Arizona. Unlike most indigenous languages in the US, 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. Zuni may have become a distinct language at least 7,000 years ago. The Zuni have, however, borrowed a number of words from Keresan, Hopi, and Pima 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 has 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 . 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 J. P. Harrington wrote one unpublished paper with the title "Zuñi Discovered to be Hokan".
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. A, B, CH, D, E, H, I, K, L, Ł, M, N, O, P, S, T, U, W, Y, ʼ
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 wewa꞉me "animals".
c is not part of the alphabet, although the digraph ch is. There are also other two letter combination sounds.
c, r, g, v, z, x, q, f, and j are not used to write Zuni, except for the occasional borrowed word.
ʼ 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. A comparison of the systems is in the table below.
Tedlock
Newman
Americanist
Current orthography
IPA
mm
mm
mm
mː
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, ch, j, lh, q, sh, z, /, : replaced Americanist č, h, ł, kʷ, š, c, ʔ, and ˑ. Tedlock's orthography uses ʼ 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 with a length mark ꞉ as in Newman's system and h and kw are used instead of j and q. Finally, Tedlock writes the following long consonants – cch, llh, ssh, tts – with a doubled initial letter instead of Newman's doubling of the digraphs – chch, lhlh, shsh – and kkw and tts are used instead of Newman's qq and zz.
