Yawelmani Yokuts


Yawelmani Yokuts is an endangered dialect of Southern Valley Yokuts historically spoken by the Yokuts living along the Kern River north of Kern Lake in the Central Valley of California. Today, most Yawelmani speakers live on or near the Tule River Reservation.

Name

Academic sources frequently use the name "Yawelmani" while referring to the language, though tribe members more often use the name "Yowlumne."
When referencing their language, modern speakers of Yawelmani use the terms "inyana", and "yaw'lamnin ṭeexil".

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Yawelmani has 8 vowel phonemes:
As can be seen, Yawelmani vowels have a number of different realizations which are summarized below:

Syllable & phonotactics

The Yawelmani syllables can be either a consonant-vowel sequence, such as deeyi- 'lead', or a consonant-vowel-consonant sequence, such as xata- 'eat'. Thus the generalized syllable is the following:
Word roots are bisyllabic and have either one of two shapes:

Vowel shortening

When long vowels are in closed syllables, they are shortened:

Vowel harmony

Yawelmani has suffixes that contain either an underspecified high vowel or an underspecified non-high vowel.
Yawelmani adds vowels to stems, when suffixes with an initial consonant are affixed to word with two final consonants in order to avoid a triple-consonant-cluster.

Grammar

Case system

Yawelmani is a primary object language.
A. L. Krober documented the language's case system in his 1907 paper The Yokuts language of south central California.
ObjectiveNoun-a
ObjectiveDemonstrative-n, -in
Objective, Pronoun-wa
Possessive-in
Instrumentalni
Locativeu
Ablativenit

Speakers

A 2011 estimate by Victor Golla placed the number of fluent and semi-fluent Yawelmani speakers at "up to twenty-five"

Revitalization efforts

In 1993, the Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program piloted a series of language programs that included Yawelmani. The program was reportedly effective in teaching conversational Yawelmani to tribal members without prior knowledge and increasing language use among elders.

Selected vocabulary