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 are a group of languages in the Otomanguean family of Mexico, spoken (in total) by approximately a half million people. The Mixtecan family includes the Trique (or Triqui) languages, Cuicatec and a large group of varieties of Mixtec languages proper.

[edit] Location

The traditional area of the Mixtecan languages is the region known unofficially 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 many urban centers of Mexico, and some important agricultural areas like Valle de San Quintín in Baja California, the Morelos valley, and in the state of Sonora. There are even Mixtec and Trique speaking communities in the United States, where the new generations become bilingual in English, rather than in Spanish, and their native language.

[edit] Name

Mixtec is an exonym. One of the varieties of the endonym for this language is Tu'un sávi ('word of the rain').

[edit] Mixtec languages

Mixtec languages (proper) are sometimes grouped by geographic area (highland, lowland, and coastal), but the precise relationship between the different varieties is not clearly established. Nor is it clear exactly how many languages or dialects there are, as the differences between the varieties range from small to large enough to prevent success in common literacy programs. Some varieties are mutually uninteligible. The situation is far more complex than a simple dialect chain because there are often very abrupt and serious changes from town to town, some likely due to population movements both before and after the Spanish conquest. Given that a language is as much (or more) a social construct as a linguistic object, it is difficult to conceive of Mixtec as a single language with dialects that is similar to modern Spanish and its well-known dialects. (See the List of Mixtecan languages.)

The efforts made by certain governmental and non-governmental organizations to standardize its writing, or to impose a standard, have not been successful. It would appear that neither the linguistic factors (differences at every level of comparison, from phonological to morphological, grammatical, semantic, lexical, and discourse-related) nor the sociological factors of the definition of "language" have been taken into consideration in the attempts to establish Mixtec as a single language with a single set of written norms. The approach of the Mixtec language academy has been, in fact, to guide the development of local written varieties in a way that will help them be successful while still recognizing common cultural and linguistic roots.

[edit] Phoneme inventories

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

[edit] Consonants

[edit] Vowels

[edit] Tones

Mixtecan languages, like Otomanguean languages generally, are all tonal languages. Mixtec normally distinguish three tones superficially: "high", "mid" and "low". An example of minimal pairs distinguished only by difference in tone is:

kuu [ku¹u²]= to be

kuu [ku²u¹]= to die

Mixtec tones are commonly represented by diacritics in the practical writing systems: high tone by acute accent, low tone by underscore, and mid tone unmarked.

Some varieties of Mixtec are characterized by tone sandhi.^[1]

Within Mixtecan languages (in the broader sense) Trique has long been recognized as having among the most complex tonal systems in the world.^[2]

[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. A more abstract analysis of nasalization in Mixtec views the entire phonemic inventory quite differently, with nasalization as a morpheme-level feature that affects the pronunciation of the consonants.^[3]

[edit] List of Mixtecan Languages recognized in ISO 639-3

ISO 639-3 lists one Cuicatec language, 54 Mixtec languages, and 3 Trique (or Triqui) languages. Details are given in

Main article: List of Mixtecan languages

[edit] See Also

Fray Francisco de Alvarado

[edit] Notes

1. ^ McKendry (2001)
2. ^ Hollenbach (1984)
3. ^ McKendry (2001)

[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.
• Campbell, Lyle (1997). American Indian languages: the historical linguistics of Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
• DALY, John P. (1973): A generative syntax of Peñoles Mixtec. Summer Institute of Linguistics of the University of Oklahoma. ISBN: n/a
• Hernández García, Mónica; y Bibiana Mendoza García. (2006). La situación sociolingüística del mixteco de San Juan Colorado en 2006. Situaciones sociolingüísticas de lenguas amerindias, ed. Stephen A. Marlett. Lima: SIL International y Universidad Ricardo Palma. http://lengamer.org/publicaciones/trabajos/mixteco_san_juan_colorado_socio.pdf
• Hollenbach, Barbara E. 1984. The phonology and morphology of tone and laryngeals in Copala Trique. Ph.D. thesis. University of Arizona
• McKendry, Inga. 2001. Two studies of Mixtec languages. M.A. thesis. University of North Dakota.
• Macaulay, Monica and Joe Salmons. 1995. The phonology of glottalization in Mixtec. International Journal of American Linguistics 61(1):38-61.

[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
• SIL page about Trique of San Juan Copala
• SIL page about the Mixtecan family