Picture this. You are in a village where goods and mail enter and exit by mule. There are no cars, for the nearest road that reaches this village is around 13 km away. Apart from hiking and mules, the only other way in and out of this village is by helicopter. Judging by this description, you might think that this community is in extremely rural places in the Amazon, the Congo, or somewhere in Australia or Papua New Guinea. But no, this is located in the United States, in Arizona, in the Grand Canyon.
This village is called Supai, which forms the capital of the Havasupai Indian Reservation. Given the transport connections with the rest of the US, the Department of Agriculture described Supai as the most remote settlement in the contiguous US, colloquially known as the Lower 48. Of course, other remote communities exist elsewhere in the US, with Alaska being the first to come to mind. After all, there are villages there accessible only by air, and in the summer, by sea as well. Some are not connected to any major roads, while others are just adequately serviced by boats. But to picture a settlement where mules still transport mail and other goods to this day, in the US, sounds really anachronistic.
Supai, or Havasuuw as referred to by some locals, is predominantly inhabited by the Havasupai people (or ‘people of the blue-green water’), who have lived in the Grand Canyon for more than 800 years. They speak a Yuman-Cochimí language called Havasupai-Hualapai, a language spoken by, well, the Hualapai people as well. This makes it related to some indigenous languages spoken in Arizona and California in the United States, and Sonora in Mexico. The two variants, Hualapai and Havasupai, are generally identical in grammar, but some words and sounds do differ, and the two people groups typically recognise Hualapai and Havasupai as separate languages. In fact, the ISO 639-3 code groups Havasupai-Hualapai with another related language in the group as well called Yavapai, assigning the code yuf for the three languages.
There are about 500 Havasupai speakers, and several thousand Hualapai speakers, and Ethnologue classifies this language as ‘endangered’, even though Havasupai is spoken by all, or nearly all of the Havasupai people today. In fact, it is pretty much among the only indigenous American languages in the United States that are spoken by nearly all of its respective ethnic population.
Although Havasupai and Hualapai share a lot of similarities, they use different orthographies for the respective dialects. For instance, Hualapai uses two special letters not found in Havasupai — the ‘d’ with stroke Đ and đ, and the ‘t’ with stroke Ŧ and ŧ. These denote the dental consonants /t̪/ and /t̪ʰ/, something that I cannot find an exact corresponding letter in Havasupai, though my best guess is the ‘d’, ‘t’, or ‘th’, at least according to this source on Havasupai, and this one in Hualapai. However. the Havasupai resource linked by the Endangered Languages Project mentioned that Havasupai did actually have the ŧ, and that represented the /t̪/ sound. The same resource also used an ‘n’ with stroke ‘ꞥ’ to represent the consonant /ŋ/ in Havasupai. Additionally, the Havasupai source seems to recognise a 5-vowel system, but the Hualapai source mentions a 6-vowel system which includes the /æ/ sound written as ae. Another point of contention is the distinction between /β/ and /v/ as well.
From a brief overview of Havasupai grammar, it seems that Havasupai uses suffixes to conjugate for noun case and number, and verb tenses, mood, aspect, and other grammar functions. The main prefixes used mainly distinguished between person in verbs. For example, /a-/ would indicate the first person, and /ma-/ indicates the second person. Noun prefixes include /vi-/, which indicate some sort of intensiveness. The nature of these affixes are generally monosyllabic, reflecting as either vowel only, consonant only, vowel-consonant, or consonant-vowel.
There are two different kinds of plurality distinguished in Havasupai, and nouns and verbs have to conjugate for these two types. These are the paucal plural, and the multiple plural. Paucal plural typically indicates ‘a few’, although the threshold that distinguishes few from many is not really clear to me.
One of the more unique aspects of Havasupai and its related languages is the feature of switch-reference. This is when a language can distinguish if a single subject or multiple subjects are mentioned in sentences containing multiple verbs. To illustrate this feature, consider the sentence ‘Tom hit Tim and he cried.’
In a language without switch-reference, how do we know which subject the pronoun ‘he’ refers to? This presents a source of ambiguity, and would require additional context to resolve. But not in Havasupai and the Yuman-Cochimí languages. Here, the same-subject marker is noted by the suffix ‘-k’, and the different-subject marker is noted by the suffix ‘-m’. Both of these markers are attached to the respective verb in the sentence. So in Havasupai, the sentence would be translated and glossed as such:
- Tom(a)-ch Tim baeq-m mi:-k-i-ny.
- Tom-SUBJ Tim 3/3.hit-DS 3.cry-SS-AUX-PAST
DS indicates the different subject marker, while SS indicates the same subject marker. From this gloss, it suggests that the verb ‘to hit’ was done by a different subject from the verb ‘to cry’. When further specified by the basic word order of subject-object-verb, you could pretty much piece together which subject did which action in such a sentence. Pretty cool.
Havasupai has a noun case system, but it also has its own set of postpositions as well. It uses a nominative-accusative case system, meaning that for verbs that take a direct object and verbs that do not take a direct object, the subject of that sentence are treated the same way, using the nominative case, which is marked by the suffix /-t͡ʃ/ in Havasupai. Direct objects use the accusative case, which are not marked in the language. There are markers for pairs of cases sharing a similar function, such as /-k/ for the allative and adessive cases, which describe being ‘on or at a location’ and a movement ‘on or to a location’ respectively.
Some postpositions distinguish between a person and a non-human object as well. For example, the word maka-l is used to refer to ‘at the back of some object’, while mako-l is used to refer to ‘at the back of someone’. Some postpositions also distinguish between the interior and exterior of something, providing extra clarity to what is referred to by something like ‘go sit in the front of the car’ (the front seat, or in front of the car?). If one specifies the front of the interior of something, one would use ya:kal, but for the exterior, one would use ya:k.
Today, the Havasupai language is alive and well, with documented transmission from older to younger generations through schools and at home. There are also dictionaries and publications available in the language, although some might use Hualapai orthography as well. In fact, in their Hualapai counterparts, there are some reports of some modernisations of the language in younger speakers, demonstrating some form of ongoing evolution in the language. With Havasupai being the first language spoken by pretty much every single Havasupai person, despite its classification as vulnerable or endangered, possibly due to the influx of tourism into the Havasupai Indian Reservation, there is optimism for the survival of this language into the future.
Further reading
Havasupai numerals
https://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/channumerals/Havasupai-Walapai-Yavapai.htm
Introduction to the Havasupai
https://library.nau.edu/speccoll/exhibits/indigenous_voices/havasupai/overview.html
Hualapai Reference Grammar (Watahomigie & Bender, 1982)
The Language Closet 