'your jaw') is an Algic language[3] spoken by the Wiyot people of Humboldt Bay, California.
Due to the enormous geographical separation of Wiyot and Yurok from all other Algonquian languages, the validity of their genetic link was hotly contested by leading Americanist linguists; as Ives Goddard put it, the issue "has profound implications for the prehistory of North America".
His data, supplied by Della Prince soon before her death, was crucial to the establishment of the genetic relationship between Algonquin and Wiyot, and effectively ended the scholarly conflict surrounding the issue.
These syllable-final consonants are lengthened in speech, but do not appear as doubled letters in transcription.
Teeter describes the "weight" of Wiyot syllables as one of the language's most salient features for speakers of English.
In speech, Wiyot words are grouped into pitch accent phrases, which are separated by commas when written.
The ends of breath groups are marked by periods, and are notably lower in relative pitch.
Breath groups end with a general weakening of articulatory force, which is followed by a noticeable interval of silence.
[citation needed] This fragment of Wiyot narration consists of two breath groups: the first contains five accent phrases, the second contains just one.
The first accent phrase of the first breath group, kowa baktéthohlabił, carries the stress on the fourth syllable.
The vowel of this 'culminative syllable', an 'e', carries an acute accent and is pronounced at a higher pitch than any other in the phrase.
After this culminative syllable, pitch and length decrease rapidly through the end of the accent phrase.
Teeter recorded many morphonemic processes that Wiyot words and phrases undergo.
In the example kado-la-wal-áh, 'I don't see it', la follows the negating element kado, and itself conveys no meaning.
When any two vowels, or any three consonants that cannot occur as a phonological cluster, are combined due to morphological construction, the general tendency is for the second element to be eliminated.
Wiyot employs both prefixation and suffixation, meaning that affixes appear both before and after stems.
Therefore, to form an impersonal transitive verb theme like rakhohw, for example, there are 10 other possible affixes that occur with stems from other categories.
Wiyot makes a sharp distinction between definite and indefinite subjects, and each of these classes has its own set of inflectional affixes.
The noun form rakhóhwalił, meaning 'he/she laughs at me', contains two inflectional affixes that modify the verb form rakhohw- shown above: -al is the nonterminal suffix that encodes a first person object, and -ił is the terminal suffix for a third person subject.
This most productive set distinguishes three persons: first- duh; second- khuh; third- huh.
Third person possession of inalienable nouns tends to be conveyed using a subordinative derivational suffix.
In the third set, the second person possessive is articulated by aspirating the initial phoneme of the noun theme.
-okw is employed with the great majority of Wiyot nouns, as in kwásokw, meaning 'on the hill', and bíhwadawawokw, 'in the smoke'.
Wiyot personal pronouns are generally used to emphasize the subjects or objects indicated in verb forms.
Verb phrases themselves frequently encode subject, object and instrumental information, but the actual entities being signified are rarely named.
Preverb sequences, which consist of up to four syntactic prefixes, are the first step in expanding the derived and inflected verbal form.
Nominal forms round out and complete Wiyot sentences, frequently serving as adjuncts to verbal phrases.
These elements are combined relatively freely to form sentences; the limited corpus of Wiyot text indicates a wide variety of syntactic organizations.
However, in recent years, the federally recognized Wiyot tribe has been attempting to revitalize the language.
The tribe advertises language courses on its website and publishes Wiyot texts for distribution, such as a calendar.