Seri () is an indigenous language spoken by between 716La situación sociolingüística de la lengua seri en 2006. and 900Ethnologue report for Seri Seri people in Punta Chueca and El Desemboque, two villages on the coast of Sonora, Mexico. The language is generally considered a language isolate, but attempts have been made to include it in the theoretical Hokan language family. No concrete evidence has been found for connections to other languages.
The earliest records of the Seri language are from 1692, but the population has remained fairly isolated. Extensive work on Seri began in 1951 by Edward and Mary Beck Moser with the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
The language is viable within its community and is used freely in daily life. Exceptions include primary and secondary school, some parts of local church services, and communications with Spanish speakers outside of the Seri community. Most members of the community, including youth, are fluent in their language, but the population of speakers is small and cultural knowledge has been dwindling since the traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle was essentially replaced in the 1930s by fixed settlements. Furthermore, many children are no longer becoming fluent in the language, for a variety of reasons (schools, internet, or non-Seri friends); some children are completely monolingual in Spanish. For these reasons, Seri is listed as a vulnerable language by UNESCO.
Classification The Serian family is a language family, with Seri as its only living member; related languages have disappeared in the last few centuries. Attempts have been made to link it to the Yuman family, to the now-extinct Salinan language of California, and to the much larger hypothetical Hokan family.For discussion of the Hokan question, see Campbell (1997), Marlett (2007) and Marlett (2011). For discussion of the relationship with Salinan, see Marlett (2008). These hypotheses came out of a period when attempts were being made to group all of the languages of the Americas into families. In the case of Seri, however, very little evidence has ever been produced. Until such evidence is presented and evaluated, the language is most appropriately considered an isolate.
Name The name "Seri" is an exonym for this people that has been used since the first contacts with the Spaniards (sometimes written differently, as "Ceres"). Gilg reported in 1692 that it was a Spanish name, but surely it was the name used by another group of the area to refer to the Seris. Nevertheless, modern claims that it is a Yaqui term that means something like "people of the sand"Apparently this claim first appeared in 1981, in a small publication written by a nonacademic, published in Mexico. It has been commonly repeated since then. or an Opata term that means "people who run fast"Peñafiel (1898:225) is the first known reference to a "probable" origin for the word "Seri" but this claim was creatively elaborated in McGee (1898:95, 124); McGee was making wild speculations as one untrained in such matters. are lacking in factual basis; no evidence has been presented for the former and no credible evidence has been presented for the latter.
The name used within the Seri community itself, for the language, is , which contrasts with ("Spanish language") and ("English language"). The expression is a noun phrase that is literally "(that) with which a Seri person speaks". The word (phonetically ) is the singular noun for "Seri person". The word is the oblique nominalization of the intransitive verb ("talk"), with the prefix (third person possessor), and the null prefix for the nominalizer with this class of root. Another similar expression that one hears occasionally for the language is , which is a similar construction based on the transitive verb ("tell") (root = ).
The name chosen by the Seri committee for the name of the language used in the title of the recent dictionary was , the plural version of . It was appropriate for a project of that type, although it is not a commonly used term. (phonetically ) is the plural form of and is the plural nominalized form corresponding to . ( is the plural root, (with an accompanying vowel ablaut) is the nominalizer; the prefix for third person possessor elides before the . The word is a singular article (which combines with the plural noun to refer to the Seri community).
The language was erroneously referred to as Kunkaak as early as the beginning of the 20th century (as in Hernández 1904), and this mistake has been repeated up to now by people who confuse the name of an ethnic group with the name of its language (which are often the same in Spanish and English). The lexeme is used in the Seri language only to refer to the people.
Phonology
Vowels Front Back High Low
Vowel length is contrastive only in stressed syllables. The low front vowels are phonetically between open-mid and near-open and have also been transcribed as .
The nonrounded vowels may be realized as diphthongs when followed by the labialized consonants , but this small phonetic detail is not written in the community-based writing system.
Consonants Labial Dental/Alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal Nasal Stop Fricative Approximant Tap
Other consonants may occur in recent loans, such as in ("friend" from Spanish ), and in ("grape" from Spanish ).
The labial fricative may be labiodental for some speakers, and the postalveolar fricative may be retroflex .
and are prototypically dental.
In unstressed syllables, assimilates to the place of articulation of the following consonant. This assimilation may take place over word boundaries in connected speech. When is preceded by or , it becomes a nasalized approximant and the following vowel becomes nasalized, e.g. "person; Seri" is pronounced or . For some speakers, word-final may become at the end of a phrase or sentence, or when said in isolation. It can be documented, by careful examination of word lists collected in the nineteenth century, that some of these phonetic rules have arisen fairly recently.Marlett (2010).
Syllable structure Syllable structure in Seri is fairly complex. Simple syllable onsets are most common, however, syllables without onsets can occur at the beginning of a word. The language generally allows up to three consonants to occur together at the beginning of a syllable, although consonants cannot be long word initially (i.e. or ). Specific combinations that may occur are much less restricted than English, for instance. Seri three-consonant onsets such as do occur, as in (Cortez spiny lobster, Panulirus inflatus). Simple codas occur, although complex ones are more common. Word-medial codas contain a single consonant, whereas word-final codas may include up to three. Clusters of four consonants also occur, but they are more rare in the lexicon: in , "there were many, ..."; in "if s/he brings it, ...", (with enclitic ).
The nuclei of Seri syllables can include one, two, or three vowels. Long vowels are indicated in writing by doubling (i.e. ⟨aa⟩ or ⟨ii⟩ for or ). Vowel clusters may include 3 separate elements, as in the one syllable word kaoi (NOM-D-delouse). Syllables with complex nuclei are stressed; otherwise, the stress generally occurs on the first syllable of a words root. Vowel clusters often occur in the initial syllable of a root.
Affixes, which may consist of one or more consonants with no vowels, can be added before or after existing consonant clusters, thereby complicating pronunciation and syllabification. When necessary, empty vowel positions are inserted and often filled with a syllabic nasal or an "i" to aid in pronunciation.
Stress Stress is contrastive in Seri. Although it usually falls on the first syllable of a root, there are many words where it does not, mostly nouns, as well as a small class of common verbs whose stress may fall on a prefix rather than on the root. An alternative analysis,Marlett (2008b). recently proposed and with fewer exceptions, assigns stress to the penultimate syllable of the root of a word (since suffixes are never stressed and prefixes receive stress only as a result of phonological fusion with the root). This rule is also sensitive to syllable weight. A heavy final syllable in the root attracts stress. A heavy syllable is one that has a long vowel or vowel cluster or a final consonant cluster. (A single consonant in the syllable coda is typically counted as extrametrical in Seri.)
Consonants following a stressed syllable are lengthened, and vowels separated from a preceding stressed vowel by a single consonant are also lengthened so that ("ant") is pronounced . Such allophonically lengthened vowels may be longer than the phonemically long vowels found in stressed syllables. The lengthening does not occur if the following consonant or vowel is part of a suffix (, the plural of ("shovelnose guitarfish"), is , without lengthening), if the stressed syllable consists of a long vowel and a short vowel (, a kind of manta ray, is , without lengthening), or if the stressed vowel is lengthened to indicate intensity. It also does not affect most loanwords.
Grammar The Seri language is a head-final language. The verb typically occurs at the end of a clause (after the subject and direct object, in that order), and main clauses typically follow dependent clauses. The possessor precedes the possessum. The language does not have many true adjectives; adjective-like verbs follow the head noun in the same kind of construction and with the same kind of morphology as verbs in the language. The words that correspond to prepositions in languages like English are usually constrained to appear before the verb; in noun phrases they appear following their complement. Verbs, nouns, and postpositions are inflected word categories in Seri.
Nouns Nouns inflect for plurality through suffixation. Compare 'mourning dove' and 'mourning doves'. Pluralization is very complicated; for this reason, each noun is listed in the dictionary with its plural form. Some nouns ostensibly use an infix to indicate plural: 'grasshopper', 'grasshoppers'. A few nouns have completely suppletive plural forms: 'Seri person', 'Seri people', 'thing', 'things'.
Kinship terms and body part nouns inflect for possessors through prefixes (with slightly different prefix sets). Compare 'your son' (of man) and 'your head'. As they are obligatorily possessed nouns, a special prefix appears when no possessor is specified, and kinship terms sometimes have additional material at the end as well. Compare 'one's son', and 'one's head'. Some nouns have an additional plural form to distinguish between singular and plural possessors: 'his/her eye', 'his/her eyes', 'their eyes'.
Verbs Finite verbs obligatorily inflect for number of the subject, person of the subject, direct object and indirect object and tense/mood. For subject person and number, compare 'I ran', 'you (sg.) ran', 'it ran, she ran, he ran', 'we ran', 'you (pl.) ran', 'they ran'.
For object person (which is written as a separate word in the orthography although it is really just a prefix), compare 'I saw you (sg.)', 'I saw you (pl.)', and 'I saw him/her/it/them'.
For indirect object (also written as a separate word except in third person), compare 'I showed it to you (sg. or pl.)', 'I showed it to him/her/them'.
The verb "tenses" divide between medial forms and final forms, irrealis and realis: (irrealis, medial, third person) '(if) it/she/he runs', (realis, medial, third person) '(as) it/she/he ran', (distal realis, final, third person) 'it/she/he ran', (proximal realis, final, third person) 'it/she/he ran', (irrealis, final, third person) 'it/she/he will run'.
A verb may also be negative and/or passive.
A transitive verb may be detransitivized through a morphological operation, and causative verbs may be formed morphologically.
Postpositions and relational preverbs