Umatilla /ˌjuːməˈtɪlə/ (Tamalúut or Imatalamłaamí Sɨ́nwit) is a variety of Southern Sahaptin, part of the Sahaptian subfamily of the Plateau Penutian group.
B. Rigsby and N. Rude mention the village of ímatalam that was situated at the mouth of the Umatilla River and where the language was spoken.
[5] A Flash Story Camp has been held by First Nations Development in collaboration with Tamastslikt's Language Enhancement Program and Education Department, and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
The Dictionary documents the language of the Umatilla people east of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon and Washington.
The dictionary includes a grammar and comparative information that places the Umatilla language in its linguistic and historical context and compiles all of its known words, phrases, and constructions.
[8] Rigsby and Rude use a technical alphabet based upon the Americanist phonetic notation to transcribe Umatilla, though other practical orthographies also exist.
Vocalic alternations result from processes (ablaut, epenthesis and truncation) that can be morphologically or phonologically conditioned.
The processes used are clisis, reduplication, ablaut, compounding, suppletion, order and the most common one is affixation (suffixation in particular).
There are two main ways to mark the plural: with the suffix -ma (tílaaki-ma 'women") and by full or partial reduplication (pšwá 'stone', pšwápšwa 'stones').
Several nouns feature irregular plural marks that might have been more widely used in the past, such as the prefix a- and the suffix -tu.