Tulekaitish

Tulekaitish is the ethnolinguistic designation for the language traditionally spoken by the Tulekait people of the Tul River valley in the central highlands. The name combines the river's name with a suffix used by regional writers to signal language or speech. In scholarly and cultural contexts, Tulekaitish refers both to the speech of the community and to its linguistic system.

Geographic distribution and speakers: The language is centered in a cluster of villages along the Tul River, with diaspora communities in adjacent towns. Linguistic surveys report that fluent speakers are mostly older adults, with younger generations increasingly bilingual in the dominant regional language. Estimates of speaker numbers vary, but the speech community is commonly described as small and endangered.

Linguistic features: Tulekaitish is generally described as an agglutinative, SOV language with a full case system for nouns and a rich set of verb affixes indicating aspect, mood, and evidentiality. Its phonology includes a distinction between aspirated and unaspirated stops and vowel harmony that extends across stem and affixes. The lexicon shows substrate influence from neighboring languages and a number of colloquial registers used in traditional storytelling.

Writing and history: Historically, inscriptions and ceremonial texts were produced in an indigenous script known as the Tul script; modern linguistic work often employs a Latin-based orthography for analysis. The earliest written records date to the late medieval period, but much of the language exists in oral tradition. Ongoing language preservation efforts include community schooling, documentation projects, and cultural programs intended to support intergenerational transmission.