Uto-Aztecan

The Comanche (Nʉmʉnʉʉ, "the People") speak a Numic language in the Uto-Aztecan family, first wave rather than second, and unrelated to Athabaskan at the family level. Numic peoples expanded out of the southwestern Great Basin; by the 1600s Eastern Shoshone bands were in the Wyoming region, and the Comanche split off around 1700 and moved south as horses spread north from Spanish New Mexico. Recent enough that Comanche and Shoshone remain near-mutually-intelligible.

The family runs from Shoshone and Paiute through Hopi, Tohono O'odham, Tarahumara and Yaqui down to Nahuatl (yes, the Aztec language), genuinely related to Comanche roughly the way English is to Hindi. Homeland is contested: the older view puts it in the Southwest with a southward spread, while Jane Hill argues the reverse, a Mesoamerican origin spreading north with maize agriculture. Neither has won.