Languages

Hopi

Citation Formats

General Reference

Language Atlas. "Hopi." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/hopi.

APA Style

Language Atlas. (n.d.). Hopi. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/hopi

BibTeX

@misc{languageatlas-hopi,
  author = {Language Atlas},
  title = {Hopi},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/hopi},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

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

hop 1

Speaker Count

6780 1

Approximate, 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.

Region

The Hopi Reservation, northeastern Arizona, United States 1

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Benjamin Lee Whorf

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