Hopi is a Uto-Aztecan language of the Northern branch, spoken by the Hopi people of northeastern Arizona. It became widely known outside linguistics through grammatical studies by Benjamin Lee Whorf, who used it to argue for a strong connection between the structure of a language and the habitual thought of its speakers, the claim now known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity.
Facts
ISO 639-3 Code Speaker CountApproximate, early-2010s United States census-era estimate; Hopi is one of the few Uto-Aztecan languages in the United States with more than a few thousand living speakers. StatusWikipedia article on Hopi: a currently spoken living language with an active native-speaker population; checked 2026-09-27. RegionThe Hopi Reservation, northeastern Arizona, United States 4 Classification
Language Kind Hopi
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An influential grammatical study of Hopi tense, aspect and cosmological vocabulary by Whorf is the best known single case cited for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity.
Source Language, Thought, and RealityBenjamin Lee Whorf
In Family
Source Ethnologue: Languages of the World
Written In
Source Hopi language (Wikipedia)
In the Other Atlases
Found In
Also in Geography Atlas: where this subject is found.
Sources
1. Glottolog: Hopi
GlottologEndangermentQuote, Endangerment
AES status: shifting
2. WALS Online: Datapoint Hopi / Order of Subject, Object and Verb
3. WALS Online: Datapoint Hopi / Tone
4. Ethnologue: Languages of the World
SIL International, 2024- ISO 639-3 Code: hop
- Speaker Count: 6780
- Region: The Hopi Reservation, northeastern Arizona, United States
View the Source 5. Language, Thought, and Reality
Hopi language (Wikipedia)
Written In: Latin Script, Infobox: scriptQuote, Written In: Latin Script, Infobox: script
Latin script
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