Sosoni-Kusiutta

Sosoni-Kusiutta is the Shoshoni speech of the Great Basin, the Central Numic member of the Uto-Aztecan family, heard across Nevada, Utah and Wyoming and up to the Snake River plain of Idaho. Its speakers call it Sosoni' ta̲i̲kwappe, or more generally newe ta̲i̲kwappe, 'the people's language'.

It divides into Western Shoshoni, Gosiute — the Kusiutta bands of western Utah — Northern and Eastern Shoshoni dialects. Its nearest kin are Timbisha and Comanche, whose speakers remained a Shoshoni band until around 1700, when they moved onto the southern plains and their dialect slowly ceased to be mutually intelligible.

All descend from Proto-Numic, whose speakers began spreading out of the southern Sierra Nevada roughly a thousand years earlier. Shoshoni was traditionally an unwritten language, carried in oral narrative and song.