Like the cultures of which they are a major part, Pueblo Indian languages endure and provide a vital means of connecting Pueblo people to their traditional beliefs and practices. Despite differences in economic adaptation and social organization, the Pueblo Indians of northern Arizona and New Mexico display very similar cultures. This similarity of cultures hides structural and historical linguistic differences between the languages but also reflects a common culture of language use. Four different language families are represented in the pueblos. The eastern pueblos are dominated by Kiowa-Tanoan languages like Tewa, Tiwa, and Towa (Jemez). In the western pueblos are Hopi, of the Uto-Aztecan language family, and Zuni, often considered a Penutian language. Keresan, with no other known family members, is spoken in both eastern and western pueblos. Though each of the Pueblo languages has inherited distinctive grammatical structures, Pueblo communities speak these diverse languages in accordance with common aesthetic principles.
Along with Kiowa—a Plains Indian language—Tewa, Tiwa, and Towa compose the Kiowa-Tanoan family, which has about the same degree of interrelatedness among its members as has the Romance language family of Europe. Rio Grande Tewa is spoken in the pueblos of San Juan, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, Nambe, Tesuque, and Pojoaque; the other Tewa language, Arizona Tewa, is spoken on First Mesa of the Hopi Reservation, brought there by Southern Tewas who left New Mexico after the Second Pueblo Revolt in 1696. The Tiwa languages are divided by geography into Northern Tiwa (Taos and Picuris) and Southern Tiwa (Isleta and Sandia). Towa is spoken only at Jemez Pueblo.
The Kiowa-Tanoan family of languages is distantly related to the Uto-Aztecan family, from which Hopi comes. All Hopi villages speak dialects of the same language, which is more closely related to such languages as Ute, Aztec, Comanche, Paiute, and Tohono O'odham than it is to any of the Kiowa-Tonoan languages.
Zuni is sometimes viewed as a Penutian language, related to such nonneighboring languages as Yokuts and Wintu—California Penutian languages—but this remote relationship is still uncertain.
The Keresan language is a continuum of dialects that range from Laguna and Acoma in the west to Cochiti, Santo Domingo, San Felipe, Santa Ana, and Sia in the east. The people of any of these pueblos can easily understand their nearest Keresan neighbors, but at the extremes of this continuum there is enough difference to preclude mutual intelligibility and to impose a true language barrier. Keresan, like Basque, is a linguistic isolate. No one has ever successfully demonstrated its connection to any recognized family of languages.
Owing to the ancestries of the Pueblo languages, it is difficult to locate common structural attributes that might be considered especially important in making claims about native grammar in relation to Pueblo worldview. Benjamin Lee Whorf, in the most famous claim of this type, found in Hopi's lack of elaboration in tense-aspect suffixes a linguistic counterpart to the Hopi emphasis on cyclical rather than linear time. However, Whorf's claim that Hopi's relative lack of suffixes distinguishing past, present, and future reflects a disinterest in linear time cannot be extended to the other Pueblo Indian languages, even though the people who speak them have many cultural similarities. Also, Whorf felt that Hopi lacked all tense distinctions corresponding to the tenses of European languages. But later scholars generally agree that Hopi does have a future tense, as in piktani, "he/she will make piki." The -ni suffix indicates a future tense and is comparable to the English auxiliary shall/will. As for languages other than Hopi, Tewa, for example, does have tense-aspect distinctions that correspond to those made in European languages. Indeed, the structural differences within the Pueblo languages make it especially difficult if not impossible to find common structures that might provide a basis for positing a shared worldview of the Pueblo people. What these languages can do that is especially instructive in this area is to redirect our attention to shared patterns of usage that transcend linguistic differences in structure.
Among the most important of these shared cultural patterns of speaking are a reliance on traditional forms, an indigenous purism, a compartmentalization of languages, and a linguistic signaling of identity. The reliance on traditional forms can be seen in the use of cultural precedents as models of speech. For example, the Hopis chant announcements of birth celebrations or public grievances. These chants are modeled on the sacred chants of the crier chief, differing from his calls to ceremonial participation only in their closing intonation.
Indigenous purism—keeping the native language free from admixture with other languages—is exemplified in the proscription of nonnative languages in the kiva during ceremonial performances. The use of foreign languages in such settings is clearly outlawed, and violators are punished. This idea extends to everyday speech and can be seen in the restriction of loan words from other languages. Despite more than three hundred years of multilingualism in Tewa and Spanish by speakers of Rio Grande Tewa, that language has relatively few Spanish loan words—less than 5 percent of the total vocabulary.
By compartmentalization a linguistic community keeps the languages in its repertoire as distinct as possible, using each in its appropriate context. The trilingual Arizona Tewas, for example, speak Tewa in their homes and community, Hopi elsewhere on the reservation, and English in situations in which they need to participate in the cash economy of the larger society or to access federal services. Though many Arizona Tewas know each of these languages very well, they have not permitted them to mix in the form of words loaned from one to another. Despite more than two hundred years of speaking Hopi, the Arizona Tewas have only one Hopi loan word in their native Tewa language.
The linguistic signaling of identity involves a cultural emphasis on using language to convey the relevant identity of the speaker. Storytellers from the Tewa, Hopi, and Jemez Pueblos, as they tell their stories in the "so it is said" tradition, must use expressions in each narrative sentence that call attention to their role as traditional narrators. Similarly, Hopi chanters explicitly mention their status as messenger when making announcements to the village. In everyday speech, language choice itself often represents a claim to membership in the group associated with that language, as when the Arizona Tewas use Hopi to indicate their status as members of the Hopi tribe.
These shared linguistic values are often realized in their most tangible and influential forms in the ritual speech of ceremonial performance. In all pueblos, the high prestige of religious ritual makes such speech a type of cultural model for everyday speech behavior in more secular contexts. This use of ritual speech as a local model represents a fundamental difference between Pueblo Indian and Euro-American philosophies of language. Whereas Pueblo Indian conceptions of language emphasize its performative and constitutive role in creating and maintaining reality, Euro-American views of language tend to relegate it to the role of reflecting a preexisting reality. Whereas the Pueblo Indian perspective emphasizes the functions of language and its many social roles, Euro-American views emphasize the structure of language and focus on its role in cognition.
See also
Languages.
Irvine Davis, The Languages of Native America "The Kiowa-Tanoan, Keresan, and Zuni Languages," ed. Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979); Paul V. Kroskrity, Language, History, and Identity: Ethnolinguistic Studies of the Arizona Tewa (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993); Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1956).
Paul V. Kroskrity
University of California at Los Angeles
