The Northern Paiute language, also known as Numu and Paviotso, is a Western Numic language of the Uto-Aztecan family. Within Numic, it is most closely related to Mono and more distantly to Panamint, Shoshone (spoken in Nevada, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming), Comanche (spoken mainly in Oklahoma, Texas, and Arizona), Kawaiisu, and Chemehuevi-Southern Paiute-Ute. The other Uto-Aztecan languages of California are Tubatulabal and the Takic languages (Cahuilla, Cupeño, Gabrielino, Juaneño, Kitanemuk, Luiseño, Serrano, and Tataviam).
The Northern Paiute language is spoken from Mono Lake, north and west through Nevada and up into Oregon and Idaho. There are two communities of Northern Paiute speakers in California, one at Mono Lake and to the immediate north (around Bridgeport and Coleville, California and Sweetwater, Nevada), the other around Susanville, California. In 1994 there were a 500 fluent speakers recorder, though by 2019 this number had dropped to 300.
In 2005, the Northwest Indian Language Institute of the University of Oregon formed a partnership to teach Northern Paiute and Kiksht in the Warm Springs Indian Reservation schools. In 2013, Washoe County, Nevada became the first school district in Nevada to offer Northern Paiute classes, offering an elective course in the language at Spanish Springs High School. Classes have also been taught at Reed High School in Sparks, Nevada. Elder Ralph Burns of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation worked with University of Nevada, Reno linguist Catherine Fowler to help develop a spelling system. The alphabet uses 19 letters. They have also developed "a language-learning book, “Numa Yadooape,” and a series of computer disks of language lessons.
Northern Paiute is a language with subject-object-verb word order. It is agglutinating and, for the most part, suffixing. Its phonemic inventory is small: five monophthongal vowels with a binary length distinction plus the Numic "sixth vowel" (a long vowel with a variable realization anywhere from the diphthong [ai] to the monophthong [e]) and 21 consonants in the northern dialects of Oregon and Idaho.
In the southernmost dialect spoken near Mono Lake, there are 24 consonants; the difference stems from a typologically interesting three-way distinction in the stop inventories (lenis-fortis-voiced fortis) that has been collapsed into a two-way distinction (lenis-fortis) in all dialects north of central Nevada. Word-level stress is largely predictable, falling virtually always on the second mora.
Morphologically, Northern Paiute shares many of the unique features of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Like other Numic languages, the first consonant of a morpheme is subject to mutation. It varies between lenis and fortis (and voiced fortis in the southern dialects) realizations with the identity of the preceding morpheme — an alternation that is synchronically arbitrary. Most nouns must bear one of a set of absolutive suffixes when they are not possessed or part of a compound, a feature that Northern Paiute shares with the rest of Uto-Aztecan. It also has a productive inventory of instrumental prefixes, formatives that occur on verbs to describe the instrument with which some activity was carried out (usually a body part, such as the head or fist, though it need not be).
