Tewa language
Tanoan language spoken by the Pueblo people / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Tewa language?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
Tewa (IPA: [tewa]) is a Tanoan language spoken by some Pueblo people, mostly in the Rio Grande valley in New Mexico north of Santa Fe, and in Arizona. It is also known as Tano,[2] or Tée-wah (archaic). There is some disagreement among the Tewa people about whether or not Tewa should have a written form, as some Pueblo elders believe that their language should be preserved by oral tradition alone. Because of this, it was not until the 1960s that the language was written down for the first time. However, many Tewa speakers have decided that Tewa literacy is an important aspect in passing down the language and so orthographies have been created for this purpose.[3]
Tewa | |
---|---|
Native to | United States |
Region | New Mexico, Arizona |
Ethnicity | Tewa people |
Native speakers | 1,600 (2007)[1] |
Tanoan
| |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | tew |
Glottolog | tewa1261 |
ELP | Tewa |
Linguasphere | 64-CAB-a |
Tewa is classified as Definitely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger | |
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. |
The language has struggled to maintain a healthy speaker base; however, because of efforts to preserve the language starting in the 1980s—both by native speakers and linguists—this problem is not as dire as it for some other indigenous languages.
Tewa has a fairly large phoneme inventory with 45 distinct individual sounds. Twelve of these are vowels, which can be either long or short. Tewa, like other Tanoan languages, also makes use of tones, of which it has four.