Roscinda Nolasquez (d. 1987) was the last native speaker of Cupeño.[3] The Cupeño people now speak English. The native name Kupangaxwicham means 'people from the sleeping place', referring to their traditional homeland, prior to 1902, of Ktipa (at the base of Warner's Hot Springs).[4][5] A smaller village was located to the south of Ktipa, named Wildkalpa.
Throughout the 1890s, there was debate over whether the Cupeño people should be allowed to continue living on traditional Cupeño territory.[4] After many years of public protests, the California Supreme Court decided to relocate the Cupeño people to the Pala Reservation.[4][5][when?]
Cupeño shows linguistic influence from both the languages that preceded it and the Yuman-speaking Ipai, who share their southern border.[4]
Cupeño is an agglutinative language, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several morphemes strung together. It is dominantly head-final, with a mostly strict word order (SOV)[3] for some constituents, such as genitive-noun constructions. However, in certain contexts, there is flexibility in the word order, allowing verbs to be shifted to the initial part of a sentence or arguments to follow verbs.[3]
Nouns
Nouns, as well as demonstratives, determiners, quantifiers, and adjectives, in Cupeño are marked for case and number and agree with each other in complex nominal constructions.[3]
Evidentiality in Cupeño is expressed with clitics, typically appearing near the beginning of the sentence:
=kuʼut 'reportative' (mu=kuʼut 'and it is said that...')
=am 'mirative'
=$he 'dubitative'
There are two inflected moods, realis =pe and irrealis =eʼp.
Tense-Aspect system
Future simple verbs remain unmarked. Past simple verbs include past-tense pronouns, while past imperfect verbs add the imperfect modifier as shown below.
Present
Imperfect
Fut. Imp
Customary
Singular
-qa
-qal
-nash
-ne
Plural
-we
-wen
-wene
-wene
Pronouns
The pronominals in Cupeño manifest in various forms and structures. The following are only attached to past-tense verbs.