Opata language

Ópata (Also Teguima, Eudeve, Heve, Dohema) is the name applied to two closely related Uto-Aztecan languages, Teguima and Eudeve spoken by the Opata people of northern central Sonora in Mexico. It was believed to be dead already in 1930, and Carl Sofus Lumholtz reported the Opata to have become "Mexicanized" and lost their language and customs already when traveling through Sonora in the 1890s, but in a recent (1993) survey by the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (Now INALI) fifteen people in the Mexican Federal District self identified as speakers of Ópata – this may not mean however that the language is actually living, since linguistic nomenclature in Mexico is notoriously fuzzy. And no studies documenting the language spoken by those fifteen persons have been published. If the fifteen persons were in fact speakers of one of the Ópata languages then the languages are severely endangered and if not they are probably already extinct. Sometimes Eudeve is called Opata, a term which should be restricted to Teguima. Eudeve (which is split into the Heve (Egue) and Dohema dialects) and Teguima (Also called Ópata, Ore) are distinct languages, but sometimes have been considered merely dialects of one single language.

Morphology

Opata is an agglutinative language, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several morphemes strung together.

References

• Lombardo, Natal. 1702. "Arte de la Lengua Teguima vulgarmente llamada Opata". México: Miguel de Ribera.
• Lombardo, Natal. n.d., ca. 1702. Arte de la Lengua Teguima vulgarmente llamada Opata. Ayer ms. 1641. Newberry Library, Chicago.
• Loaysa, Balthasar, unknown year, Arte de la lengua hegue. Ms. in Bibliothèque Nationale, París; copia de W.E. Gates en la Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago.
• Lionnet, Andrés. 1979. El lexico del eudeve. Mimeography. Friends of Uto-Aztecan Working Conference, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropologicas, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico, June 23. : .
• Miller, Wick R., 1983, "A Note on Extinct Languages of Northwest Mexico of Supposed Uto-Aztecan Affiliation", International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 49, No. 3, Papers Presented at a Symposium on Uto-Aztecan Historical Linguistics (Jul., 1983), pp. 328–334
• Shaul, David Leedom, 1989 "Teguima (Opata) phonology", Southwestern Journal of Linguistics 9:150-162. ...
• Shaul, David Leedom, 1990, "Teguima (Opata) Inflectional Morphology", International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Oct., 1990), pp. 561–573
• Smith, Buckingham
• Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language at Project Gutenberg