Tipai is the spelling used by anthropologists and people in Spanish-speaking countries to refer to Tiipay, a Native American language spoken by a number of Kumeyaay

Kumeyaay

The Kumeyaay, also known as Tipai-Ipai, Kamia, or formerly Diegueño, are Native American people of the extreme southwestern United States and northwest Mexico. They live in the states of California in the US and Baja California in Mexico. In Spanish, the name is commonly spelled...

 or Kumiai groups in northern Baja California

Baja California

Baja California officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Baja California is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is both the northernmost and westernmost state of Mexico. Before becoming a state in 1953, the area was known as the North...

 and southern San Diego County, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

. Tipai is also known as Southern Diegueño. Hinton

Leanne Hinton

Leanne Hinton is an emerita professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. She specializes in American Indian languages, sociolinguistics, and language revitalization...

 (1994:28) provided a "conservative estimate" of 200 Tipai speakers in the early 1990s; the number of speakers has declined steadily since that time.

Tipai belongs to the Yuman language family and to the Delta–California branch of that family. In the past, Tipai and its neighbors to the north, Kumeyaay

Kumeyaay language

Kumeyaay , also known as Central Diegueño, Kamia, and Campo, is the Native American language spoken by the Kumeyaay people of southern San Diego and Imperial counties in California. Hinton suggested a conservative estimate of 50 surviving Kumeyaay speakers...

 and Ipai

Ipai language

Ipai, also known as Iipay or Northern Diegueño, is the Native American language spoken by the Kumeyaay people of central San Diego County, California. Hinton suggested a conservative estimate of 25 surviving Ipai speakers....

, have been considered dialects of a single Diegueño language, but linguists now recognize that they represent at least three distinct languages (for discussion, see Langdon

Margaret Langdon

Margaret Langdon was a linguist who studied and documented many languages of the American Southwest and California, including Kumeyaay, Northern Diegueño , and Luiseño....

 1990). Tipai itself is not a uniform speech variety, and some suggest that it might be possible to recognize multiple languages within Tipai (Laylander 1985:33; Mithun

Marianne Mithun

Marianne Mithun is a leading scholar of American Indian languages and language typology. She is currently Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara....

1999:577).

Published documentation of the Tipai language includes a descriptive grammar (Miller 2001), a comparative dictionary of the Kumeyaay languages spoken in the U.S. (Miller and Langdon 2008), a Tipai word list (Meza and Meyer 2008), and texts (Hinton 1976, Hinton 1978, see also Miller 2001:331-348).