Mixtecan languages

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Map showing Mexican indigenous languages with more than 100.000 speakers. Mixtecan is shown in dark green.

The Mixtecan languages or Tu'un sávi (meaning the word of the rain in Mixtec) are the languages of the Mixtec people that call themselves ñuu sávi. It is the fourth most spoken language of the indigenous languages of Mexico with a total of 446,236 speakers above the age of five years old. Following the INEGI's 2000 survey, the Mexican institution for development of indigenous communinties, CDI, determined the Mixtec-speaking population above 500,000, making the language the third most spoken in the country.

The traditional area of the Mixtec language is the region known as La Mixteca a large mountainous territory covering parts of the states of Oaxaca, Puebla and Guerrero. However due to the migrations caused by the extreme poverty in this region, Mixtec speakers now form smaller communities in most urban centers of Mexico, and some important agricultural areas like Valle de San Quintín in Baja California, and the Morelos valley. There are even Mixtec speaking communitites in the United States, where the new generations become bilingual in English and Mixtec, rather than English and Spanish.

Because of the fragmentary nature of the Mixtec territories the language has split into different dialect groups (six according to the CDI, but more than 30 when counted by the Ethnologue) and some varieties are mutually uninteligible. Mixtecan is therefor considered a dialect complex, a fact first recognized by the Spanish conquistadors. Some early chroniclers comment there were more than twelve varieties of Mixtecan languages. Mixtecan languages form the most widely spoken subgroup of the Otomanguean family.

The efforts made by the Mixtecan Language Academy and other civil associations in Mexico to standardize its writing and lexis have not been successful.

[edit] Mixtecan Phoneme inventories

Linguists are still discussing whether some sounds of Mixtecan languages should be considered one sound with double articulation of groups of two phonemes for example the phonemes /ts/, /nd/, /jn/and others. Below is a list of the some of the phonemes most commonly shared by the different Mixtecan languages.

[edit] Consonants

[edit] Vowels

[edit] Tones

One of the most characteristic properties of the Mixtecan languages is that they are all tonal languages. Mixteco normally distinguish three tones: "high", "mid" and "low". An example of a minimal pairs distinguished only by difference in tone is:

Kuu [ku¹u²]= to be

Kuu [ku²u¹]= to die

Mixtecan tones are represented by diacritics. Spanish acute accent represent high tone, low tone is shown by a bar underlining the low tone vowel and mid tone is not represented.

[edit] Nasalization

Nasalization of vowels can be phonemic or an allophonically determined variation of vowels preceding nasal consonants. Some varieties also show nasal harmony, causing non-nasalized vowels to become nasalized in words with one or more nasal vowel.

[edit] References

• (1977): Mixteco de Santa María Peñoles, Oaxaca. El Colegio de México. México.
• ALEXANDER, María Ruth (1980): Gramática mixteca de Atlatlahuca. Gramatica yuhu sasáu jee cahan nayuu San Esteban Atltlahuca. Instituto Lingüístico de Verano. México. (In Spanish and mixtec) ISBN: n/a
• BRADLEY, C. Henry (1970): A linguistic sketch of Jicaltepec Mixtec. Summer Institute of Linguistics of the University of Oklahoma.
• BRADLEY, C. Henry, y Barbara E. Hollenbach, ed. (1988-1992): Studies in the syntax of Mixtecan languages. Summer Institute of Linguistics - University of Texas at Arlington. Dallas.
• DALY, John P. (1973): A generative syntax of Peñoles Mixtec. Summer Institute of Linguistics of the University of Oklahoma. ISBN: n/a

[edit] External links

• Universidad Tecnológica de la Mixteca (Spanish)
• Libro de texto de la Secretaría de Educación Pública de México en lengua mixteca de la Montaña de Guerrero (Spanish)
• Ethnologue website of SIL International