| Cora | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| naáyarite | ||||
| Spoken in | Mexico: Nayarit, Jalisco, Durango | |||
| Native speakers | 8,000 (date missing) | |||
| Language family |
Uto-aztecan
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| Official status | ||||
| Regulated by | Secretaría de Educación Pública | |||
| Language codes | ||||
| ISO 639-3 | crn | |||
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The Cora language is an indigenous language of Mexico of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is spoken by the ethnic group that is widely known as the Cora but who refer to themselves as Naáyarite. The Cora inhabit the northern sierra of the Mexican state Nayarit which is named after its indigenous inhabitants. Cora is a Mesoamerican language and shows many of the traits defining the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area. Under the "Law of Linguistic Rights" it is recognized as a "national language" along with 62 other indigenous languages and Spanish which have the same "validity" in Mexico [1].
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There are two main variants of Cora. One is that spoken in the Sierra de Nayarit ranges of Jalisco, called Cora del Nayar or Cora Meseño, with approximately 9,000 speakers (1993 census). The other variant is called Cora de Santa Teresa and is spoken by approximately 7,000 people (1993 census) in north-central Nayarit. Cora de Santa Teresa has such a low degree of mutual intelligibility with other Cora speech communities that Ethnologue considers it a separate variety. Due to recent migrations a small community of Coras exists in the United States in western Colorado.
The closest relatives of the Cora language is the Huichol language together with which it forms the Coracholan subgroup of the Uto-Aztecan languages. The Taracahitan group of languages containing among others the languages Tarahumara, Yaqui and Mayo is also related to Cora.
The phonology of Cora is typical of southern Uto-aztecan languages with five vowels and a relatively simple consonant inventory. However atypically of Uto-aztecan languages Cora has developed a simple tonal system or pitch accent with an harmonic accent taking high falling tone.
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal / Retroflex | Velar | Glottal | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosives | p/b | pʷ | t | k | kʷ | ʔ | ||||
| Fricatives | s | ʂ | x | h | ||||||
| Affricates | ts | tʃ | ||||||||
| Liquids | l | ɽ | ||||||||
| Nasals | m | mʷ | n | |||||||
| Semivowels | w | j | ||||||||
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close (high) |
i | ʉ | u |
| Mid | ɛ | ||
| Open (low) |
ɑ |
Cora is a verb-initial language; its grammar is agglutinative and polysynthetic, particularly inflecting verbs with many affixes and clitics. There are a number of adpositional clitics that can also be used as relational nouns.
Nouns are marked for possession and exhibit several different plural patterns.
Different classes of nouns mark the plural in different manners. The most common way is by means of suffixes - The suffixes used for pluralization are the following: -te, -mwa, -mwa'a, -tse, -tsi, -kʉ, -sʉ, -se, -si, -ri and -i. Other ways to form the plural is by reduplication of the final vowel of a noun stem or by shifting the accent from one syllable to the other. Another class of works form their plurals by suppletion.
Possessed nouns are marked with a prefix expressing the person and number of their possessor. The forms of the prefix expressing first person singular is ne-, na-, or ni-, for second person singular it is a-, mwa'a-, a'a-. The third person singular is marked by the prefix ru-. A first person plural possessor is marked by the prefix ta-, second person plural by ha'amwa- and third person plural by wa'a-. Furthermore there are two suffixes. One, -ra'an is used to mark an obviative or fourth person possessor. The other is -me'en used to mark a plural possessum of a singular possessor.
| Number/person of Possessor | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| 1. person | nechi'i "my house" | tachi'i "our house" |
| 2. person | achi'i "your house" | há'amwachi'i "Your (pl.) house" |
| 3. person | ruchi'i "his/her own house" | wa'áchi'i "Their house" |
| 4. person | chí'ira'an "the house of the other" | |
| pl. possessum + 3.p.sg. possessor | chí'imeen "his/her houses" |
Verbs are inflected for person and number of subject and direct object and object prefixes for 3rd person inanimate objects also show the basic shape of the object. Verbs are also inflected for location and direction.
Typologically Cora is interesting because it is a VSO language but also has postpositions, a trait that is rare cross-linguistically but does occur in a few Uto-Aztecan languages (Papago, Tepehuán, and some dialects of Nahuatl).
Cora-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio station XEJMN-AM, broadcasting from Jesús María, Nayarit.
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