Tewa (/ˈteɪwə/ TAY-wə)[2] is a Tanoan language spoken by several Pueblo nations in the Rio Grande valley in New Mexico north of Santa Fe, and in Arizona.

Today, the Endangered Languages Project estimates a total of 1,500 speakers worldwide, with 1,200 of them in the New Mexico pueblos and 300 in the Arizona village of Hano.

Of these speakers, few are fluent with the vast majority being semi-speakers, and only in a few places, like Hano, are children acquiring Tewa.

Tewa can be written with the Latin script; this is occasionally used for such purposes as signs (Be-pu-wa-ve 'Welcome', or sen-ge-de-ho 'Bye').

Roots also tend to show heavier stress than affixes if each is the same syllable and tone type.

Verbs can be divided into two classes, S and A, standing for stative and active, based of the pronomial prefixes which they contain.

In general, S verbs deal with identity, quality, feeling, condition, position, and motion.

Class N nouns are mostly designations for age-sex differentiation, kinship terms, and forms which translate as pronouns.

These compromise words whose English equivalents involve time, location, manner, interrogation, etc.

Because of this, younger Tewa speakers tend to not use the noun hierarchy and instead rely on the morphology present in passive sentences.

[11] Tewa, like other Tanoan languages, has a trepartite number system, which means that nouns can be counted through different syntactic constructions in three ways.

Esther Martinez, who lived to be 94 years old, was nationally known for her commitment to preserving the Tewa language.

The Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act is named for her, and as of September 15, 2012, members of the New Mexico congressional delegation have introduced legislation to extend the program for another five years.

[3][15] The Santa Clara Pueblo Tewa Language Revitalization Program also sponsors cultural activities, such as visiting Crow Canyon.

[18][19] A 2012 documentary film, The Young Ancestors, follows a group of teenagers from Santa Fe Preparatory School as they learn the Tewa language in a self-study program with the help of a mentor, seventh grade literature teacher Laura Kaye Jagles.