A comprehensive Hopi-English dictionary edited by Emory Sekaquaptewa and others has been published, and a group, the Hopi Literacy Project, has focused its attention on promoting the language.
As of 2013, "a pilot language revitalization project, the Hopi Lavayi Nest Model Program, for families with children birth through 5," is being planned for the village of Sipaulovi.
[5][needs update] In 2004, Mesa Media, a nonprofit organization, was created to help revitalize the language.
His work was based primarily on a single off-reservation informant, but it was later checked by other reservation speakers.
Malotki (1983) reports that Third Mesa speakers of younger generations have lost the labialization feature of w on the different subject subordinator -qw after the vowels a, i, e, u where they have -q instead.
In words with kw or ngw in the syllable coda, the labialization is also lost: Hopi is part of the Pueblo linguistic area (a Sprachbund) along with members of the Tanoan family, the Keresan languages, Zuni, and Navajo.
In 1629 a small group of Franciscan missionaries started arriving in Hopi territory, building a church the following year.
They remained there until 1680 when the Pueblo Revolt occurred and the Hopi expelled the Spanish from the region.
Both the practices of the Spanish when there, and the stories of negative experiences of Puebloan refugees from the Rio Grande region, contributed to a Hopi attitude where acculturation was resisted or rejected.
There is idiolectal free variation with the voiced labial fricative represented with ⟨v⟩, which varies between labiodental and bilabial [v ~ β].
Hopi has a number of stop contrasts at the velar place of articulation that occur before the low vowel /a/.
Complicating this pattern are words borrowed from Spanish that have a velar followed by a low vowel.
Voegelin (1956) suggests that the fronted articulation represented by ⟨ky⟩ is distinguished more by presence of the palatal glide than by the difference in the articulatory position of the dorsal contact.
The preaspirated stops /ʰp, ʰt, ʰts, ʰkʷ, ʰk, ʰq/ and voiceless sonorants /m̥, n̥, ŋ̠̊, l̥, ȷ̊, w̥/ of Mishongnovi only occur in syllable coda position.
The CVCC cluster is very rare due to limited number of CC combinations in the language.
The stress pattern in Hopi follows a simple rule that applies to nearly all words.
Some exceptions to this rule are sikisve "car", wehekna "spill" and warikiwta "running".
To distinguish certain consonants written as digraphs from similar looking phonemes meeting across syllable boundaries, a period is used: kwaahu ('eagle') but kuk.wuwàaqe ('to follow tracks').
Noun and verb plurality is indicated, among other devices, by partial reduplication, marked in the gloss below with a tilde (~).
Benjamin Lee Whorf, a well-known linguist and still one of the foremost authorities on the relationships obtaining between southwestern and Central American languages, used Hopi to exemplify his argument that one's worldview is affected by one's language and vice versa.
Among Whorf's best-known claims was that Hopi had "no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call 'time.
[dubious – discuss] Furthermore, according to John A. Lucy, many of Whorf's critics have failed to read his writings accurately, preferring instead to proffer uncharitable caricatures of his arguments.