An acoustic description of Chemehuevi Free

Chemehuevi, a member of the Uto-Aztecan language family, is spoken along the Colorado River in both Arizona and California. The language is extremely endangered with fewer than five known speakers, all over the age of 50. Chemehuevi is classified following Miller et al. (2005) as a dialect of Colorado River Numic along with Southern Paiute and Ute. The present work offers a general description of the acoustic characteristics of the Chemehuevi phoneme inventory based on both an analysis of archival (3 female speakers recorded by: Major, 1969; Tyler, 1972; Press, 1973–1974) and current field recordings (1 male speaker recorded by: Penfield, Serratos, and Tucker, 2005–2006, 2010) of the language. To date, there is little acoustic analysis of Numic languages available. Vowel characteristics are analyzed by extracting duration and the first three formant frequencies. Consonants are also investigated using relevant acoustic measures (such as voice-onset time and centroid frequency). Additionally, the present acoustic analysis is compared to early descriptions of the phoneme inventory and provides evidence regarding the nature of the vowel inventory (is /e/ a phoneme), location of stress, idiolectal differences, and word final voiceless vowels.