Hopi language

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{{language |name=Hopi |nativename=Hopilàvayi |familycolor=American |states=United States |region=Northeastern Arizona |speakers=~5000 |fam1=Uto-Aztecan |fam2=Northern |iso2=nai|iso3=hop}}

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.

1 Phonology
2 Metaphysics
3 References
4 External links

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Phonology

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 Template:IPA, /e/, /i/, /o/, Template:IPA, and Template:IPA). All six vowels occur in long and short forms; long vowels are indicated in writing by doubling them.

The consonants of Hopi are (Template:IPA, spelled v, is apparently both a phoneme in its own right as well as an intervocallic allophone of /p/):

	Labial	Dental	Palatal	Retroflex	Palatalized Velar	Velar	Labialized Velar	Uvular	Labialized Uvular	Glottal
Stop	p	t			ky	k	kw	q	qw	´
Affricate		ts
Voiceless Fricative				s						h
Voiced Fricative	v			r
Nasal	m	n			ngy	ng	ngw
Approximant		l	y				w

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Metaphysics

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.

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