Yawelmani Yokuts (also spelled Yowlumne and Yauelmani) 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.
Academic sources frequently use the name Yawelmani while referring to the language, though tribe members more often use the name Yowlumne. The difference in terminology comes from the language itself, where the form Yowlumne is singular and Yawelmani is the paucal form, that is, it refers to a small group. An increasing number of academic sources, including Weigel (2005), have opted to use Yowlumne instead, as the use of Yawelmani can be regarded as a misnomer.
When referencing their language, modern speakers of Yawelmani use the terms (Indian), and (speech of the Yowlumne).
A 2011 estimate by Victor Golla placed the number of fluent and semi-fluent Yawelmani speakers at "up to twenty-five."
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.
Yawelmani has 10 vowel phonemes:
As can be seen, Yawelmani vowels have a number of different realizations (phones) which are summarized below; [ê] and [ÃÂ] are variants in rapid speech of /i/ and /u/, respectively:
The Yawelmani syllables can be either a consonant-vowel sequence (CV), such as in 'however', or a consonant-vowel-consonant sequence (CVC), such as in 'eating, food'. Thus the generalized syllable is the following:
Verbal roots are disyllabic and have either one of two shapes:
Outside of verbal roots, more complex phonotactic forms are also permitted, so long as each syllable has the structure CV(C).
Restrictions exist on the distribution of certain glottalized consonant phonemes in surface form: glottalized nasals and approximants cannot appear word-initially or after another consonant; if they would otherwise appear after another consonant, they lose their glottalized quality.
When long vowels are in closed syllables, they are shortened:
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.
Yawelmani is a primary object language.
A. L. Kroeber documented the language's case system in his 1907 paper The Yokuts Language of South Central California.
In his 1944 grammar of the Yokuts language, Newman analyzed the case system in greater depth, taking care for the different realizations of the case suffixes with nouns based primarily on the phonotactic profile of the root or stem to which the nouns attach, as in the table below. Note that the forms represent the basic case suffixes; in Newman's analysis, vowel harmony with the preceding syllable may apply as appropriate. Elements in parentheses are analyzed by Newman to be added to the root in preparation for the affix (which he terms an "inorganic protective element"), rather than forming part of the affix itself. Moreover, Newman treats the CV:C category (his IAb type) as generally a variant of CVC (his IAa type), except for two unique members of the CV:C class, 'one' and 'sweathouse'.
Examples of these paradigms are provided in the following table.