Chevak Cup始ik or just Cup始ik (and sometimes Cugtun) is a subdialect of the Hooper Bay鈥揅hevak dialect of
Yup始ik spoken in southwestern
Alaska in the
Chevak (Cup始ik, Cev始aq) by Chevak Cup始ik Eskimos (own name Cup始it or Cev始allrarmuit).[1][2][3] Speakers of the Chevak subdialect refer to themselves as Cup始ik (as opposed to Yup始ik), while speakers of the
Hooper Bay subdialect refer to themselves as Yup始ik (not Cup始ik), as in the Yukon-Kuskokwim dialect.
The Central Alaskan Yupik who live in the village of
Chevak call themselves Cup始ik (plural Cup始it), whereas those who live on
Nunivak Island (Nuniwar in Nunivak Cup始ig, Nunivaaq in Central Yup始ik) call themselves Cup始ig (plural Cup始it), the spelling differences serving as a self-designated cultural identifier between the two groups. In both dialects, the Yup始ik consonant c is pronounced as an English ch. The Cup始ik dialect is readily distinguished from other dialects of Yup始ik by the pronunciation of the Yup始ik "y" sound as a "ch" sound (represented by the letter "c"), and by some fundamental differences in the basic vocabulary.
The oldest fully bilingual person in Chevak is Leo Moses, born in 1933; there are few if any persons born after 1945 who do not speak English.[1]
The first documentation of the Hooper Bay-Chevak dialect (beyond occasional citations) is found in the unpublished notes of
Jesuit priests residing at Hooper Bay and Kashunuk in the 1920s and 1930s. Published recognition of Hooper Bay-Chevak as a morphologically distinct dialect of Yup始ik seems to begin with
Michael E. Krauss in 1973,[4] although the fundamental differences between the dialects were common knowledge among native speakers.[1] Cup'ik is a critically threatened language, and English the primary language of everyday communication among most of those with knowledge of the language.
Education
Their unique cultural and linguistic identity has allowed them to form a single-site
school district, the
Kashunamiut School District, rather than joining a neighboring Yup始ik school district. English and Cup始ik bilingual education is done at this school. There is a tri-language system in Chevak;
English, Cup始ik, and a mixture of the two languages.
Before 1950 formal education for students in Chevak took place in the Qaygiq[5] (semi-underground men's community house), and in the homes of the people.[6]
^Woodbury, Anthony Cabot (2002). "The word in Cup始ik". In Dixon, R. M. W. and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (eds.) Word: A cross-linguistic typology, 79-99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.