Команчский язык: история, современное состояние и сохранение.

Uto Aztecan language spoken by the Comanche people in the United States

Comanche (/lang//k//ə/'/m//æ//n//tʃ//i/, endonym Nʉmʉ Tekwapʉ̲) is a Uto Aztecan language spoken by the Comanche, who split from the Shoshone soon after the Comanche had acquired horses around 1705. The Comanche language and the Shoshoni language are quite similar, but certain consonant changes in Comanche have inhibited mutual intelligibility. The name Comanche comes from the Ute word kɨmantsi "enemy, stranger". Their own name for the language is nʉmʉ tekwapʉ, which means "language of the people".

Although efforts are now being made to ensure its survival, most speakers of the language are elderly. In the late 19th century, Comanche children were placed in boarding schools where they were discouraged from speaking their native language, and even severely punished for doing so. The second generation then grew up speaking English, because of the belief that it was better for them not to know Comanche. The Comanche language was briefly prominent during World War II. A group of seventeen young men referred to as the Comanche Code Talkers were trained, and used by the U. S. Army to send messages conveying sensitive information in the Comanche language so that it could not be deciphered by the enemy. As of July 2013, there were roughly 25 30 native speakers of the language, according to The Boston Globe. Comanche language courses were available at the now closed Comanche Nation College. The college previously conducted a language recording project, as the language is "mostly oral", and emphasizing instruction for tribal members. On the language learning platform Memrise, the Comanche Nation Language Department has published learning materials. As of 2022, there were fewer than nine fluent native speakers of Comanche, many of the old speakers having succumbed to old age, health problems or the COVID 19 pandemic.

Comanche distinguishes vowels by length. Vowels can be either long or short. Long vowels are never devoiced and in the orthography they are represented as (aa, ee, ii, oo, uu, ʉʉ). An example of a long vowel is the (ee) in [wakaréʔeː] 'turtle'. Primary stress: Primary stress is "marked when it is non initial stress". In the 2016 film The Magnificent Seven two of the titular characters, a Comanche warrior named Red Harvest and Sam Chisholm, an African American warrant officer, speak Comanche to each other. In the 2019 TV series The Son, the main character, Eli McCullough, lives with a tribe of Comanche natives, who speak in Comanche to each other and later to him. The 2022 movie Prey, set in the early 18th century, is the first feature film to have a full Comanche language dub.