Mesoamer

An insatiable appetite for ancient and modern tongues

Overview. Meso-America is a historical, cultural and linguistic area that includes central and southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and parts of Honduras and Nicaragua. It also includes parts of northwest Mexico. There, flourished several civilizations starting with the Olmecs in the Gulf Coast of Mexico in 1500 BCE and continuing with the Maya of southern Mexico and Guatemala, the culture of Monte Albán in Oaxaca, Teotihuacan, Toltec and Aztec in Central Mexico. When the Spanish conquered Mexico in 1519, there may have been twenty million people in Meso-America. Within a century of the conquest, the Indian population had decreased by 80 percent as a result of war, disease, forced labour, and starvation. Many languages became extinct but around seventy have survived until today.

Meso-American native languages belong to several stocks which do not seem to share a common origin. The largest families, regarding the number of languages and speakers, are Uto-Aztecan, Oto-Manguean, and Mayan. Two smaller families are Totonacan and Mixe-Zoquean. Misumalpan is a family of Central America that is outside the cultural area of Meso-America proper. Two other families, Chibchan and Arawakan, are essentially South American families that have spread into some areas of Central America. Several languages are not obviously related to a family and are considered isolates, like Tarascan and Huave.

Map of the indigenous languages of Meso-America

Classification.

*Uto-Aztecan: is a large family divided into the northern tongues of North America and the southern languages of Mexico and Central America. It extends from Oregon in the north to El Salvador in the south. Nahuatl or Aztec, spoken in central Mexico by more than 1.5 million, is by far the largest Uto-Aztecan member. Other Mexican languages of the family are the Tarahumara complex of the state of Chihuahua, Yaqui in Sonora (also in Arizona), and Huichol in Nayarit. Pipil is spoken in western Salvador. click on the map to enlarge it

*Totonacan: is a family of just two languages spoken on the eastern coast of Mexico (Veracruz, Puebla, Hidalgo), Totonac by a quarter million people and Tepehua by about 35,000.

*Oto-Manguean: located mainly in the states of Oaxaca, Guerrero, México, Hidalgo and Querétaro. This family includes Oto-Pamean, Popolocan, Tlapanecan, Mixtecan, Zapotecan, Chinantecan, and Manguean branches. All languages are tonal. The largest are Otomi and Mazahua in the Oto-Pamean branch, Mazatec in the Popolocan branch, Chinantec, Mixtec and Zapotec. The Manguean branch of Chiapas, Nicaragua, Honduras and Costa Rica is now extinct.

*Mixe-Zoquean: is a small language family spoken in the area of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Veracruz, Chiapas, Oaxaca) including Mixe, Zoque and Popoluca.

*Mayan: one of the best studied in the Americas, it stretched from what is now northern El Salvador and Honduras, through Guatemala and Belize to southern Mexico. With 24 to 30 languages and more than 5 million speakers, it is the most diversified and populous language family of Mesoamerica. Two million Maya speakers live now in Mexico, 3.2 million in Guatemala, 20,000 in Belize and a handful in El Salvador and Honduras.

Major Mayan languages are: Yucatec in the Yucatan peninsula, Tzeltal and Tzotzil in Chiapas, Ch'ol in Tabasco and Chiapas, Mam and Q'anjob'al in west Guatemala, K'iche' and Kaqchikel in central and south Guatemala, Q'eqchi' (or Kekchi) in north Guatemala. Another important language is Huastec spoken in San Luis Potosí and Veracruz and separated by more than 1,500 kilometers from other Mayan languages.

*Misumalpan: in Nicaragua and Honduras. Miskito is the largest language with 200,000 speakers.

*Central-South American families

•Arawacan: is a large family with forty languages. In Central America is represented by Garifuna spoken in the Atlantic coast of Honduras, Guatemala and Belize. In South America is one of the major Amazonian groups. Arawakan was also spoken in the Bahamas, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico by the Taino, but it became extinct just one-hundred years after the European arrival.

•Chibchan: in eastern Honduras, southeastern Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, and also in the north of South America.

*Isolates

•Tarascan: or Purepecha is spoken in the northwest of the state of Michoacán in Mexico mainly by rural communities in the highlands. The former center of the Tarascan state was around lake Pátzcuaro which remains central to the community.

•Cuitlatec: in Guerrero. Extinct.

•Huave: is spoken by 18,000 people in four villages facing the Gulf of Tehuantepec in the Pacific coast of the state of Oaxaca.

•Xinca: in south Guatemala near El Salvador. Extinct.

•Lenca: Honduras and El Salvador. Extinct.

•Jicaque or Tol: in north-central Honduras, with 300-400 speakers.

Speakers. Mesoamerican indigenous languages (excluding Arawakan and Chibchan) are spoken by 10 million people. The number of speakers of each family and those of the main languages are presented in descending order:

a)By family

Mayan

Oto-Manguean

Uto-Aztecan

Totonacan

Mixe-Zoquean

Misumalpan

5,500,000

2,000,000

1,800,000

280,000

250,000

200,000

b)By language

Nahuatl

K'iche'

Q'eqchi'

Yucatec

Mam

Mixtec

Zapotec

Kaqchikel

Tzeltal

Tzotzil

Otomi

Totonac

Mazatec

Ch'ol

Miskito

Huastec

Mazahua

Chinantec

Mixe

Tarascan

Tlapanec

Q’anjob’al

1,550,000

900,000

825,000

800,000

540,000

480,000

450,000

405,000

285,000

245,000

225,000

215,000

200,000

165,000

136,000

134,000

125,000

120,000

100,000

Uto-Aztecan

Mayan

Oto-Manguean

Mayan

Oto-Manguean

Totonacan

Oto-Manguean

Mayan

Misumalpan

Mayan

Oto-Manguean

Mixe-Zoquean

Isolate

Oto-Manguean

Mayan

FREQUENT FEATURES

-Contrasting voiced stops and fricatives are absent except in a few languages. Aspirated stops and affricates are rare.

-Several languages of the Oto-Manguean family (Otomi, Mazatec, Mixtec, Chinantec, Zapotec) have tones. The number of tones varies from two to five. Outside this family, two-tone systems are found in Uto-Aztecan Huichol and in three Mayan languages (Yucatec, one dialect of Tzotzil and Uspantek) as well as in a dialect of the isolate Huave (Huave de San Mateo).

-Nominal possession is expressed in almost all languages (except Tarasco) by means of a possessive pronoun joined to a possessed noun; e.g., “the man's dog” is expressed as “his-dog the man.”

-Relational nouns express locative notions equivalent to English prepositions. They consist of a possessive pronominal affix and a location noun, usually a body part. Most languages have, in addition, a generic relational particle that functions as a generic preposition. For example: my-head (“on me”), at-its-belly the kitchen (“inside the kitchen”).

-Some Oto-Manguean and Mayan languages distinguish between inclusive and exclusive first person plural pronouns, meaning respectively "you and I”, and “I and someone other than you”.

-In the verbal system, aspect is more relevant than tense in many languages, particularly in Mayan and Oto-Manguean. The copula (the verb 'to be') is not expressed in most languages.

-Vigesimal numeral systems are universal. Numerals are always placed before the noun. Several languages, like Mayan, Nahuatl, Totonac, Tarascan, have numeral classifiers which indicate the type of noun being counted.

-The verb is never in final position in the sentence. All the other possible combinations (VSO, VOS, SVO) are found. VSO (Verb-Subject-Object) in Nahuatl, Mixtec, varieties of Chinantec and Zapotec, Mam, etc; VOS (Verb-Object-Subject) in many Mayan languages and Otomi; SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) in Mazatec and Huave.

-Semantic calques, also known as loan translations, are compound words spread across different languages. The elements of the compound are the same though translated into the recipient language. For example, head of leg (“knee”), deer-snake (“boa constrictor”), stone of bird (“egg”) are common expressions in the Meso-American area but not outside it.

Writing

In contrast to North American and South American Indians, those of Meso-America developed writing systems prior to the arrival of the Europeans, showing that the idea of writing developed independently more than once in the history of mankind. Exactly when and where writing appeared in Meso-America is not fully understood yet.

The most complete and elaborate writing system was that of the Mayas which contained about 700 signs; some of them were logographic (i.e. represented entire words) but the majority were phonetic (representing syllables more than individual sounds). The earliest Maya inscriptions date back to 200-300 BCE. Besides stone inscriptions, the Maya and other Indians wrote on paper produced from the amate tree (Ficus glabrata) which was fold into books. After several decades of intensive work, the Maya script has been finally deciphered revealing that many inscriptions are historical and propagandistic while the few surviving books have a predominant religious and calendric content.

There is growing evidence that the Olmecs had some kind of writing, which would have been earlier than that of the Mayas, though its existence is still controversial. Another early writing system was that of the Zapotecs of Oaxaca though it has not been deciphered and seems to be mainly pictorial. Two later writing systems are those of the Mixtecs and Aztecs; they were logographic and were employed to record names of persons and places; they also resorted to symbols and pictorial conventions that do not necessarily constitute a script.