Northern Yutonahua

Northern Yutonahua is the northern branch of the Uto-Aztecan family, gathering the Numic languages together with Hopi and the Takic group across the western United States. Numic takes its name from a reconstructed word for a person, and its peoples traditionally lived by hunting and gathering across the Great Basin and the Snake and Colorado River country.

Linguists place the Proto-Numic homeland in the southern Sierra Nevada. From there a slow expansion carried related dialects across the basin during the last thousand years.

Hopi belongs instead to the maize-farming Pueblo world of northern Arizona, where the mesa village of Oraibi was founded before 1100, while Takic languages served the coasts and deserts of southern California. By the 1300s these related tongues stretched from the Sierra Nevada to the Rocky Mountains.