Shoshoni language

Shoshoni is primarily spoken in the Great Basin, in areas of Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and Idaho.

[3]: 1 The consonant inventory of Shoshoni is rather small, but a much wider range of surface forms of these phonemes appear in the spoken language.

Shoshoni's closest relatives are the Central Numic languages Timbisha and Comanche.

[3]: 1 The number of people who speak Shoshoni has been steadily dwindling since the late 20th century.

[6] The Duck Valley and Gosiute communities have established programs to teach the language to their children.

[6] UNESCO has classified the Shoshoni language as "severely endangered" in Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming.

[11] Open-source Shosoni audio is available online to complement classroom instruction, as part of the university's long-standing Shoshoni Language Project.

[12][13] The Shoshone-Bannock Tribe teaches Shoshoni to its children and adults as part of its Language and Culture Preservation Program.

[14] On the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, elders have been active in digital language archiving.

Shoshoni is taught using Dr. Steven Greymorning's Accelerated Second Language Acquisition techniques.

[19] In July 2012, Blackfoot High School in Southeastern Idaho announced it would offer Shoshoni language classes.

The Chief Tahgee Elementary Academy, a Shoshone-Bannock charter school teaching English and Shoshoni, opened at Fort Hall in 2013.

In addition, there is the common diphthong /ai/, which functions as a simple vowel and varies rather freely with [e]; however, certain morphemes always contain [ai] and others always contain [e].

With some dialectical variation, mora counting resets at the border between stems in compound words.

Shoshoni nouns inflect for three cases (subjective, objective, and possessive) and for three numbers (singular, dual, and plural).

These case markers can be predicted only to a degree based on phonology of the noun stem.

[3]: 48 Common instrumental prefixes include:[3]: 46–7 Subject-object-verb (SOV) is the typical word order for Shoshoni.

[5]: 32–3 [3]: 75 nɨIhunannabadgerpuinnuseenɨ hunanna puinnuI badger see"I saw a badger"nɨwɨpersonsakkuhtɨntherepaittsɨkkinnawas holleringnɨwɨ sakkuhtɨn paittsɨkkinnaperson there {was hollering}"the person was making a fuss there" [3]: 75–6 In ditransitive sentences, the direct and indirect object are marked with the objective case.

[23] ɨtɨinnahot-CONTɨtɨinnahot-CONT"it [the weather] is hot" [3]: 83 In particular, it is common for the subject to be deleted when a coreferential pronoun appears elsewhere in the sentence.

[3]: 77 State-of-being sentences express “be” by excluding an overt verb, resulting in a basic subject-object order.

These different-subject subordinate suffixes also mark verb tense and aspect: in the nominative case, they are -na if present, -h/kkan if stative, -h/kkwan if momentaneous, -ppɨh if perfect, -tu'ih if future, and -ih if unmarked.

[3]: 66  For example, sunni naaku wihyu nɨnɨttsi utɨɨkatti tattɨkwa "when that happened, something scary came to them."

Multiple orthographies exist, with differing levels of acceptance among Shoshoni speakers.