Tipai-Kumeyaay-Huerteno

Tiipai, Tiipay or Tipai is a Native American language belonging to the Delta–California branch of the Yuman language family, which spans Arizona, California, and Baja California. As part of the Yuman family, Tiipai has also been consistently included in the controversial quasi-stock Hokan. Tiipai is spoken by a number of Kumeyaay tribes in northern Baja California and southern San Diego County, California. There were, conservatively, 200 Tiipai speakers in California in the early 1990s, and 100 reported it 2007, with an additional 230 speakers in Mexico in 2000.

In the past, Tiipai and its neighbors to the north, Kumeyaay and Ipai, had been considered three dialects of a single Diegueño language—as a result, Tiipai is also known as Southern Diegueño. However, linguists now recognize that they represent at least three distinct language clusters within a speech variety continuum. Tiipai itself is not a uniform speech variety, with borders that are far from clearcut and variations across towns such as Jamul, San José, and La Huerta. Some suggest that it might be possible to recognize multiple languages within Tiipai. On the other hand, despite a great deal of lexical variation, all varieties of Tiipai are mutually intelligible, meaning that it is a single language with a great deal of variation across communities. For a discussion of sociolinguistic motivation for this variation, see Field 2011.

Loanwords are numerous in Tiipai—the majority are from Spanish, while a few come from English. Published documentation of the Tiipai language includes a descriptive grammar of Jamul Tiipai, a trilingual dictionary, a trilingual book of stories and oral histories from Baja California Kumiai communities, a word list, and texts, including audio and video on the ELAR website.

From Wikipedia · Tiipai language · CC BY-SA 4.0