Language
Many Arizona Tewa are trilingual in Tewa, Hopi, and English. Some speakers also speak Spanish and/or Navajo. Arizona Tewa is a variety of the Tewa language of Tanoan family and has been influenced by Hopi (which is an unrelated Uto-Aztecan language). Arizona Tewa and the forms of Rio Grande Tewa in New Mexico are mutually intelligible with difficulty.
What is remarkable about this speech community is that the influence of the Hopi language on Arizona Tewa is extremely small in terms of vocabulary. Arizona Tewa speakers, although they are trilingual, maintain a strict separation of the languages (see also Code-switching: Example). These attitudes of linguistic purism may be compared with other Tewa speech communities in New Mexico where there has been very little borrowing from Spanish even though the Tewa and Spanish have had long periods of contact and the Tewa were also bilingual in Tewa and Spanish.
Traditionally, the Arizona Tewa were translators for Hopi leaders and thus also had command of Spanish and Navajo. This contrasts with the Hopi who generally can not speak Tewa (although they may have limited proficiency in Navajo).
Read more about this topic: Arizona Tewa
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