TONGVA LANGUAGE, Indigenous language spoken by the Tongva (aka Gabrielino) people, the original inhabitants of the Los Angeles Basin and the southern Channel Islands. It belongs to the Takic subgroup of the Uto-Aztecan language family, one of the largest language families in the Americas. It is a polysynthetic language, meaning that entire phrases or even sentences can be expressed in a single word via the accumulation of morphemes. Although there are no remaining speakers for whom it was their mother tongue, efforts are being made to revitalize and preserve Tongva through documentation, linguistic research, and educational and cultural programs.
The last native Tongva speakers lived during the early twentieth century; in the 1940s it ceased being the language of everyday communication of the Gabrielino people as they adopted English as their primary language. Recently, however, the Tongva tribal council has been engaged in efforts to resuscitate the language, using the unpublished field notes of the linguist and ethnologist John Peabody Harrington, who compiled them around the time Tongva was dying out, as source material for reconstructing its grammar. In addition, linguistic researchers have been comparing Tongva with other, more extensively documented languages within the Takic group such as Serrano. These efforts are seen as crucial for maintaining the cultural identity and heritage of the Tongva people and reconnecting them with their ancestral language and traditions.