Tarahumara language

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Tarahumara Raramúri
Spoken in:	Mexico: Chihuahua
Total speakers:	—
Language family:	American  Uto-aztecan   Taracahita    Tarahumara
Official status
Official language of:	One of 63 national languages of Mexico [1]
Regulated by:	Secretaría de Educación Pública
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	—
ISO 639-3:	—
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

The Tarahumara language is a Mexican indigenous language of the Uto-Aztecan language family spoken by around 70,000 Tarahumara or Raramúri people in the state of Chihuahua.

[edit] Varieties

The ethnologue counts 5 varieties of Tarahumara:

Name	ISO-code	Location	Speakers
Central Tarahumara	tar	Southwestern Chihuahua.	55,000. 10,000 monolinguals.
Lowland Tarahumara	tac	Chihuahua.	15,000
Northern Tarahumara	thh	Chihuahua, towns of Santa Rosa Ariseachi, Agua Caliente Ariseachi, Bilaguchi, Tomochi, La Nopalera.	300
Southeastern Tarahumara	tcu	Chinatú, Chihuahua.	No estimate
Southwestern Tarahumara	twr	Chihuahua, town of Tubare	100 (1983 SIL).

[edit] Phonology

Tarahumara has five vowel qualities in addition to distinguishing vowel time: /i, e, a, o, u/. It also distinguishes between short and long vowels. The vocalic accent is phonemic. The consonant inventory includes:

	labial		alveolar		palatal		velar		glottal
voiceless occlusive	p		t				k		ʔ
affricate			t͡s
fricative			s						h
approximant	w		l, ɾ		j
nasal	m		n

It should also be noted:

• The affricate /t͡s/ is usually written also as <c>.
• The phoneme /j/ is practically always written as <y>.
• The phoneme /ʔ/ is sometimes written as <ʼ>.

[edit] References

• Miller, Wick. (1983). Uto-Aztecan languages. In W. C. Sturtevant (Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 10, pp. 113-124). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution.