| Kitanemuk | |
| States: | United States |
| Region: | Southern California |
| Ethnicity: | Kitanemuk |
| Extinct: | Last spoken in the 1940s by Marcelino Rivera, Isabella Gonzales, and Refugia Duran |
| Familycolor: | Uto-Aztecan |
| Fam1: | Uto-Aztecan |
| Fam2: | Northern Uto-Aztecan |
| Fam3: | Takic |
| Fam4: | Serran |
| Iso3: | none |
| Glotto: | kita1252 |
| Notice: | IPA |
Kitanemuk was a Northern Uto-Aztecan language of the Serran branch. It was very closely related to Serrano, and may have been a dialect. It was spoken in the San Gabriel Mountains and foothill environs of Southern California. The last speakers lived some time in the 1940s, though the last fieldwork was carried out in 1937. J. P. Harrington took copious notes in 1916 and 1917, however, which allowed for a fairly detailed knowledge of the language.
Kitanemuk is an agglutinative language, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several morphemes strung together.
The consonant phonemes of Kitanemuk, as reconstructed by Anderton (1988) based on Harrington's field notes, were (with some standard Americanist phonetic notation in (angle brackets):
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | labio. | ||||||
| Nasal | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||
| Plosive | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | ||
| Affricate | pronounced as /ink/ (c) | pronounced as /ink/ (č) | |||||
| Fricative | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ (š) | pronounced as /ink/ | |||
| Rhotic | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||||
| Approximant | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ (y) | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||
Word-finally, pronounced as /ink/ becomes pronounced as /link/, and all voiced consonants become voiceless before other voiceless consonants or word-finally.
| Front | Central | Back | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Close | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | |
| Mid | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | ||
| Open | pronounced as /ink/ |
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