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= Mojave Language = Mojave or Mohave is the native language of the Mohave people along the Colorado River in northwestern Arizona, southeastern California, and southwestern Nevada. Approximately 70% of the speakers reside in Arizona, while approximately 30% reside in California. It belongs to the River branch of the Yuman language family, together with Quechan and Maricopa.

The Mojave language became endangered during the 20th century when Mohave children were taken away from their parents to be raised in boarding schools, where they were prohibited to speak the language. They were prohibited from speaking it even with their parents when they occasionally visited home; while many parents did not speak English.

Contents

 * 1Phonology
 * 1.1Consonants
 * 1.2Vowels
 * 2Revitalization
 * 3See also
 * 4Notes
 * 5References
 * 6External links

Phonology[edit]
All claims and examples in this section come from Munro (1974) unless otherwise noted. Mojave phonology is similar to that of Maricopa. One difference is that in the 19th century Mohave speakers shifted the sounds [s] and [ʂ] (similar to sh as in "shack") to [θ] (th as in "thick") and [s], respectively.

Consonants[edit]
The post-alveolar stops /ɳ/ and /ʈ/ only occur in very few words.

Vowels[edit]
Mohave has five vowel qualities, with length distinction and the weak vowel /ə/.

Syntax
For the word order in the Mojave language, noun phrases containing the subject occur first with the verb occurs last in sentences with additional non-subject nouns, i.e. the object of a sentence, occurring between the subject and the verb. Also, the subject of a sentence is typically marked with the morpheme {č}.Thereby the Mojave language can be described as a subject-object-verb, SOV, language. Even with that SOV description, however, there are instances in which there aren't more than one or two specified, marked, or described noun phrases in a sentence because any noun phrase complement of a verb can be omitted as context determines. Moreover, utterances that contain a direct and an indirect object, in which both are unmarked by a morpheme, the word order is essential: the basic form is that the indirect object comes before the direct object. For example, here are tables in a 3-line gloss of two sentences with captioned differences: