Havasupai–Hualapai (Havasupai–Walapai) is a Native American language spoken by the Hualapai and Havasupai peoples of northwestern Arizona. Havasupai–Hualapai belongs to the Pai branch of the Yuman–Cochimí language family , together with its close relative Yavapai and with Paipai , a language spoken in northern Baja California. There are two main dialects of this language: the Havasupai dialect is spoken in the bottom of the Grand Canyon , while the Hualapai dialect is spoken along the southern rim. As of 2010, there were approximately 1500 speakers of Havasupai-Hualapai. UNESCO classifies the Havasupai dialect as endangered and the Hualapai dialect as vulnerable. There are efforts at preserving both dialects through bilingual education programs.
31-697: Supai ( Havasupai : Havasuuw ) is a census-designated place (CDP) in Coconino County , Arizona , United States, within the Grand Canyon . As of the 2010 census , the CDP had a population of 208. The capital of the Havasupai Indian Reservation , Supai is the only place in the United States where mail is still carried in and out by mules. Supai has been referred to as "the most remote community" in
62-642: A nominative/accusative case marking system, as mentioned in the morphology section. It is said that noun incorporation occurs in the language. This is notable with verbs of belonging, such as with the noun "nyigwáy(ya)," meaning "shirt." To say "to be wearing a shirt" the noun form "nyigwáy" is incorporated into the verb, appearing with a prefix for person, and suffixes for reflexiveness and auxiliaries. The noun form obligatorily also occurs before its incorporated verb form: nyigwáy shirt '-nyiggwa:y(-v)-wi 3 / 1 -shirt(- REFL )- AUX nyigwáy '-nyiggwa:y(-v)-wi shirt 3/1-shirt(-REFL)-AUX "I have
93-466: A concert. In 1984 an Arizona reggae band, Shagnatty, gave a concert; a photojournalist accompanying the band reported residents told her the music had been popular in the community for as long as 25 years, when visitors from California had introduced it. She describes community members joining the band on stage and toasting in Supai . Tourism is economically important. When COVID-19 shut down area tourism,
124-609: A convenience store and a cafe. [REDACTED] Media related to Supai, Arizona at Wikimedia Commons Havasupai language The modern Hualapai and Havasupai have separate sociopolitical identities, but a consensus among linguists is that the differences in speech among them lie only at the dialect level, rather than constituting separate languages, and the differences between the two dialects have been reported as "negligible". The language even bears similarity to Yavapai , and sometimes they are grouped together for means of linguistic classification (see Ethnologue ). Regarding
155-482: A primary stressed (phonetically long) vowel. The most common syllable structures that occur in Havasupai-Hualapai are CV, CVC, and VC; however, consonant clusters of two or three consonants can and do occur initially, medially, and finally. At word boundaries, syllabification breaks up consonant clusters to CVC or CV structure as much as is possible. CCC and CCCC clusters occur, but they are always broken up by
186-422: A shirt on." Similar processes occur with kinship terms and verbs of belonging such as with the following noun "bi:", which means "female's brother's child/nephew/niece": e'e yes '-bi:-v-wi 3 / 1 -nephew- REFL - AUX e'e '-bi:-v-wi yes 3/1-nephew-REFL-AUX "Yes, I have a nephew/niece." This can be considered a more iconic form of noun incorporation, as the noun doesn't also occur outside
217-684: A syllable boundary (that is, C-CC/CC-C or CC-CC). Syllable-initial CC clusters are either composed of (1) /θ/, /s/, or /h/, followed by any consonant or (2) any consonant followed by /w/. Morphologically, Hualapai-Havasupai is classified by WALS as weakly suffixing. There are different affixes for nouns, verbs, and particles in Hualapai-Havasupai, and there exist suffixes that can change nouns to verbs and vice versa. The affixes that exist—apart from word roots—are generally short in phonemic length, restricted to C, CV, VC, or V in composition. Verbs are marked for person (first, second, and third) through
248-419: A view that Supai was a kind of " Shangri-la ". Tourists and some residents were evacuated from Supai and surrounding area on August 17 and 18, 2008, due to flooding of Havasu Creek complicated by the failure of the earthen Redlands Dam (subsequent to the main flooding event) after a night of heavy rainfall. Evacuees were taken to Peach Springs, Arizona . More heavy rains were expected and a flash flood warning
279-594: Is stress-timed , which governs many parts of the phonological structure of the language, including where long vowels occur, what kind of consonant clusters can occur and where, and how syllable boundaries are divided. There are three types of stress : primary, secondary, and weak. All vowels can have any of these three types of stress, but syllabic consonants can only have weak stress. Primary stresses occur at regularly timed intervals in an utterance. Secondary stresses occur according to an alternating-stress system, which most commonly dictates that two secondary stresses follow
310-489: Is in the "Unorganized School District #00". According to Arizona law, an unorganized school district is one that does not have a high school. The 2010 U.S. Census school district map for Coconino County shows Supai as in "School District Not Defined". Areas not in school districts are under the jurisdiction of the respective County Superintendent of Schools. Reggae music is popular in the Supai community; according to Afropop ,
341-529: Is widely discussed in the literature. Watahomigie et al. poses that the use of /β/ is attributed to older generations of Hualapai dialect speakers, and Edwin Kozlowski notes that in the Hualapai dialect, [v] is weakened to [β] in weak-stressed syllables. Thus, the underlying form /v-ul/ "to ride" surfaces as [βəʔul]. Long and short vowels are contrastive in the language. The following is a minimal pair illustrating of
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#1732869546228372-619: The contiguous United States by the U.S. Department of Agriculture . It is accessible only by helicopter, on foot or by mule. Supai is 8 miles (13 km) from the nearest road and has no automobiles in the community. In 1910 there was a flood of Supai which affected the town. In the 1960s Martin Goodfriend, a tourist, began to advocate for the Supai people, and a columnist of the Arizona Republic , Don Dedera, wrote articles about Goodfriend's findings. Dedera stated that Goodfriend countered
403-503: The CDP the population was spread out, with 30.8% under the age of 16, 10.4% from 16 to 21, 54.8% from 21 to 65, and 4.8% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 25.2 years. 48.6% of the population was male; 51.4% was female. Supai is located inside the Grand Canyon on tribal lands outside of national park jurisdiction and is governed by the tribe. There is a post office in Supai. Mules are used to ferry mail between Supai and
434-473: The Orthography section of this page. As shown from the chart above, aspiration is a contrastive feature in many stops and affricates in Hualapai-Havasupai. Often, consonant sounds are realized in different ways in different phonetic environments. For example, if a glottal stop occurs at the beginning of a word, it may sometimes be replaced by a vowel such as /a/. The phonemic difference between /β/ and /v/
465-563: The census is often miscounted. In the 2020 census, the population of Supai was counted as zero. In 2023, the Associated Press reported that "about 500 of the nearly 770" members of the Havasupai tribe live in the village. As of the census of 2010, there were 208 people and 43 households. The racial makeup of the CDP was 96.6% Native American , 0.5% White , 0.5% Other , and 2.4% of mixed race . Hispanic or Latino of any race were 4.3% of
496-588: The community of Peach Springs, along paved BIA Road 18. There is one K–8 school in Supai, Havasupai Elementary School , run by the Bureau of Indian Education . Additionally, by 1970 there was a Head Start program in Supai. Supai lacks a high school. In 1988, Havasupai ES was K-8, and residents went to boarding schools after the 8th grade. The most common boarding school, that year, was Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, California . In 1967, most older students (past
527-503: The following sentence, both subject markers are used: John(a)-ch John- SUBJ Mary Havasupai Trail Havasupai Trail is the main trail to Supai, Arizona , and to Havasu Falls . There are other trails, such as the Topocoba, Moqui and Kirby trails. However, these other trails are not maintained. As far back as 1976, they were described as ranging from "in poor repair" to "primitive, dangerous foot trails." Special permission
558-672: The helicopter evacuation of 200 visitors. All tourism was suspended from March 2020 until February 2023 due to the COVID-19 pandemic . Located within the Grand Canyon , Supai is accessible only by foot, pack animal or helicopter. It is the only place in the United States where mules still carry the mail, most of which is food. According to the United States Census Bureau , the CDP has a total area of 1.7 square miles (4.4 km), all land. It lies 3,195 feet (974 m) above sea level. As with many communities living on reservations,
589-431: The incorporate verb form. Havasupai-Hualapai, like other Yuman languages, is known for its switch-reference . This is a mechanism that illustrates whether the subjects are the same for multiple verbs within a sentence. The marker "-k" states that the subject-references are identical, and the marker "-m" is used when the first and second subjects are different for two verbs. The following sentences are examples of each, with
620-497: The lists of noun suffixes and prefixes below: Particles exist as interjections, adverbs, possessive pronouns, and articles. There are relatively few particles that exist in the language. They can be marked through prefixes for subordination and intensity in the same way as nouns and through the suffix /-é/, which indicates adverbial place. Havasupai-Hualapai's basic word order is S-O-V . For noun phrases, articles , such as demonstratives , occur as suffixes. Havasupai-Hualapai has
651-400: The markers bolded for illustrative purposes: Rhiannon-ch Rhiannon- SUBJ he'-h dress- DEM tuy -k 3 / 3 .take off- SS dathgwi:l -k -wi-ny 3 / 3 .wash- SS - AUX - PAST Rhiannon-ch he'-h tuy -k dathgwi:l -k -wi-ny Rhiannon-SUBJ dress-DEM {3/3.take off}- SS 3/3.wash- SS -AUX-PAST "Rhiannon took off the dress and washed it. Note that in
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#1732869546228682-475: The phonemic contrast of Havasupai-Hualapai vowel length: pa:ʔ ' person ' vs. paʔ ' arrow ' . Short vowels may sometimes be reduced to [ə] or dropped completely when they occur in an unstressed syllable, primarily in a word-initial context. In addition to this chart, there are four attested diphthongs that are common for this language: /aʊ/ as in 'cow', /aɪ/ as in 'lie', /eɪ/ as in 'they', and /ui/ as in 'buoy'. Havasupai-Hualapai's prosodic system
713-400: The population. There were 43 households, out of which 34.9% were married families living together, 32.6% had a female householder with no husband present, 14.0% had a male householder with no wife present, and 18.6% were non-families. 16.3% of all households were made up of individuals, and 2.3% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 4.84. In
744-758: The prefixes /a-/, /ma-/, and /ø-/, respectively. Many other affixes attach to the verb to reveal information like tense, aspect , modality , number, adverbial qualities, and conjunctivity. The verb suffixes /-wi/ and /-yu/ are divisive for verbs and are weak-stressed by-forms of /wí/, meaning do , and /yú/, meaning be. These occur on all verbs. The three numbers that can be marked in verbs are singular, paucal plural, and multiple plural. There are six types of aspect, and any verb can have as many as three and as few as zero aspect markers. The six types are distributive-iterative, continued, interrupted, perfective, imperfective, and habitual. Nouns are marked for number, case, definiteness , and demonstrativeness , as can be seen by
775-536: The relationship of Havasupai and Hualapai to Yavapai, Warren Gazzam, a Tolkapaya Yavapai speaker, reported that "they (Hualapais) speak the same language as we do, some words or accents are a little different". For illustrative purposes, the following chart is the consonant inventory of the Hualapai dialect of the language, which varies slightly from the Havasupai dialect. Because the two dialects have different orthographies, IPA symbols are used here. For more information about how these sounds are depicted in writing, see
806-463: The residents feel "a kinship with the Rastafarian faith ". According Cannabis Culture , Bob Marley had wanted to visit but died before he could make the trip. Tyrone Downie and Cedelia Booker learned of the popularity of the music after Chris Blackwell encountered several Supai residents in a Las Vegas record store buying reggae and helicoptered into Supai in 1982 with a grand piano and played
837-536: The rest of the United States. Perishable goods are, as of 2016, stored in a walk-in freezer at the Peach Springs, Arizona , post office while they await being loaded onto mules. According to The Smithsonian, the Peach Springs post office is the only one in the country with a walk-in freezer. A contractor, who as of 2016 had held the contract with the post office for 25 years, picks up the mail and drives it an hour to
868-619: The second grade, the upper grade at Havasupai ES at the time) attended school in Fort Apache or Phoenix . In that time period some students went to boarding schools in California. Some other students stayed with host families and attended school district-operated public schools. Prior to its closure, the Phoenix Indian School was the closest Native American boarding high school to Supai. According to Coconino County's parcel viewer, Supai
899-487: The trailhead, where it's loaded onto mules for the journey down the canyon. Each mule carries up to 200 pounds of mail. Supai can be reached by hiking 8 miles (13 km), descending 2,004 feet (611 m) in elevation from Hualapai Hilltop through the Hualapai Canyon. Helicopters also fly from Hualapai Hilltop into Supai. Hualapai Hilltop, the trailhead for Havasupai Trail , is located about 70 miles (110 km) from
930-483: The tribe estimated a 60-day closure of tourism to Supai would result in a 15% loss to the tribe's annual revenues. As of 2014 approximately 20,000 people visit each year, most to see and hike around Havasu Falls and other nearby waterfalls. There is a campground and Havasupai Lodge in Supai on tribal grounds, and a National Park Service campground and Phantom Ranch outside of Supai on national park grounds. Supai has one small, air-conditioned lodge (Havasupai Lodge),
961-551: Was put into effect, necessitating the evacuation, according to the National Park Service . The floods were significant enough to attract coverage from international media. Damage to the trails, bridges, and campground was severe enough for Havasupai to close visitor access to the village, campground, and falls until the spring of 2009. Further flooding in 2010 resulted in damage to repairs made previously and closures effective until May 2011. In July 2018, flash flooding forced