Oüodham: (, ) or Pima-Papago (pronounced and , with the vowel) is a Uto-Aztecan language of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico, where the Tohono Oüodham (formerly called the Papago) and Akimel Oüodham (traditionally called Pima) reside. In 2000 there were estimated to be approximately 9,750 speakers in the United States and Mexico combined, although there may be more due to underreporting.
It is the 10th most-spoken indigenous language in the United States, and the 3rd most-spoken indigenous language in Arizona (after Western Apache and Navajo). It is the third-most spoken language in Pinal County, Arizona, and the fourth-most spoken language in Pima County, Arizona.
Approximately 8% of Oüodham speakers in the US speak English "not well" or "not at all", according to results of the 2000 Census. Approximately 13% of Oüodham speakers in the US were between the ages of 5 and 17, and among the younger Oüodham speakers, approximately 4% were reported as speaking English "not well" or "not at all".
Native names for the language, depending on the dialect and orthography, include , , and .
The Oüodham language has a number of dialects.
Due to the paucity of data on the linguistic varieties of the Hia C-eḠOüodham, this section currently focuses on the Tohono Oüodham and Akimel Oüodham dialects only.
The greatest lexical and grammatical dialectal differences are between the Tohono Oüodham (or Papago) and the Akimel Oüodham (or Pima) dialect groupings. Some examples:
There are other major dialectal differences between northern and southern dialects, for example:
The CukuḠKuk dialect has null in certain positions where other Tohono Oüodham dialects have a bilabial:
Oüodham phonology has a typical Uto-Aztecan inventory distinguishing 17 consonants and 5 vowels.
The retroflex consonants are apical postalveolar.
Most vowels distinguish two degrees of length: long and short, and some vowels also show extra-short duration (voicelessness).
Papago is pronounced in Pima.
Additionally, in common with many northern Uto-Aztecan languages, vowels and nasals at end of words are devoiced. Also, a short schwa sound, either voiced or unvoiced depending on position, is often interpolated between consonants and at the ends of words.
There are two orthographies commonly used for the Oüodham language: AlvarezâÂÂHale and Saxton. The AlvarezâÂÂHale orthography is officially used by the Tohono Oüodham Nation and the Salt River PimaâÂÂMaricopa Indian Community, and is used in this article, but the Saxton orthography is also common and is official in the Gila River Indian Community. It is relatively easy to convert between the two, the differences between them being largely no more than different graphemes for the same phoneme, but there are distinctions made by AlvarezâÂÂHale not made by Saxton.
The Saxton orthography does not mark word-initial or extra-short vowels. Final generally corresponds to HaleâÂÂAlvarez and final to HaleâÂÂAlvarez :
There is some disagreement among speakers as to whether the spelling of words should be only phonetic or whether etymological principles should be considered as well.
For instance, vs. ("frybread"; the spellings and are also seen) derives from (a warm color roughly equivalent to yellow or brown). Some believe it should be spelled phonetically as , reflecting the fact that it begins with , while others think its spelling should reflect the fact that it is derived from ( is itself a form of , so while it could be spelled , it is not since it is just a different declension of the same word).
Oüodham is an agglutinative language, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several morphemes strung together.
Oüodham has relatively free word order within clauses; for example, all of the following sentences mean "the boy brands the pig":
In principle, these could also mean "the pig brands the boy", but such an interpretation would require an unusual context.
Despite the general freedom of sentence word order, Oüodham is fairly strictly verb-second in its placement of the auxiliary verb (in the above sentences, it is ):
Verbs are inflected for aspect (imperfective , perfective ), tense (future imperfective ), and number (plural ). Number agreement displays absolutive behavior: verbs agree with the number of the subject in intransitive sentences, but with that of the object in transitive sentences:
The main verb agrees with the object for person ( in the above example), but the auxiliary agrees with the subject: "I am branding the pigs".
Three numbers are distinguished in nouns: singular, plural, and distributive, though not all nouns have distinct forms for each. Most distinct plurals are formed by reduplication and often vowel loss plus other occasional morphophonemic changes, and distributives are formed from these by gemination of the reduplicated consonant:
Oüodham adjectives can act both attributively modifying nouns and predicatively as verbs, with no change in form.
The following is an excerpt from Oüodham Piipaash Language Program: ("Roadrunner"). It exemplifies the Salt River dialect.
In Saxton orthography:
The following is a song from Oüodham Hohoüok Aüagida (Oüodham Legends and Lore) by Susanne Ignacio Enos, and Dean and Lucille Saxton. It exemplifies the "Storyteller dialect".
In Saxton orthography:
English: