The Mazahua language (, ) is an Oto-Pamean language spoken in the central

states of Mexico A Mexican State (), officially the Free and Sovereign State (), is a constituent Federated state, federative Polity, entity of Mexico according to the Constitution of Mexico. Currently there are 31 states, each with its own constitution, State g ...

by the ethnic group that is widely known as the Mazahua but calls itself the Hñatho. It is a Mesoamerican language and has many of the traits of the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area. In 2003, along with some 62 other indigenous languages, it was recognised by a

statutory law A statute is a law or formal written enactment of a legislature. Statutes typically declare, command or prohibit something. Statutes are distinguished from court law and unwritten law (also known as common law) in that they are the expressed wi ...

Mexico Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a country in North America. It is the northernmost country in Latin America, and borders the United States to the north, and Guatemala and Belize to the southeast; while having maritime boundar ...

( General Law of Linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples) as an

official language An official language is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as, "the language or one of the languages that is accepted by a country's government, is taught in schools, used in the courts of law, etc." Depending on the decree, establishmen ...

in the

Federal District A federal district is a specific administrative division in one of various federations. These districts may be under the direct jurisdiction of a federation's national government, as in the case of federal territory (e.g., India, Malaysia), or the ...

and the other administrative divisions in which it is spoken, and on an equal footing with Spanish. The largest concentration of Mazahua is found in the municipality of San Felipe del Progreso,

State of México The State of Mexico, officially just Mexico, is one of the administrative divisions of Mexico, 32 federal entities of the United Mexican States. Colloquially known as Edomex (from , the abbreviation of , and ), to distinguish it from the name o ...

, near

Toluca Toluca , officially Toluca de Lerdo , is the States of Mexico, state capital of the State of Mexico as well as the seat of the Municipality of Toluca. Toluca has a population of 910,608 as of the 2020 census. The city forms the core of the Grea ...

. The closest relatives of the Mazahua language are Otomi, Matlatzinca, and Ocuilteco/Tlahuica languages, which together with Mazahua form the Otomian subgroup of the Oto-Pamean branch of the

Oto-Manguean The Oto-Manguean or Otomanguean () languages are a large family comprising several subfamilies of indigenous languages of the Americas. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean languages, Ma ...

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term ''family'' is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics ...

. Mazahua is a

tonal language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasi ...

and distinguishes high, low, and falling tones on all syllables except the final syllable of a word whose stress is predictable. Mazahua's most distinctive feature is its abnormally-large

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

inventory, around sixty phonemes, or twice the number in English. There are eight vowel phonemes, seven contrastive

nasal vowel A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel /ɑ̃/ () or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are p ...

s, and as many as forty-five consonants. Amongst them are ejective consonant, ejectives, implosive consonant, implosives and contrastive voiceless

sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels a ...

s. Along with Sindhi and Tukang Besi, Mazahua is a rare case of a language with true implosives that is far from regions where implosives are commonly encountered. It is also one of the few languages with ejective fricatives. Mazahua-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio station XETUMI-AM, broadcasting from Tuxpan, Michoacán.

Phonology

Consonants

Oral vowels

Orthography

The orthography is based on the

Spanish alphabet Spanish orthography is the orthography used in the Spanish language. The alphabet uses the Latin script. The spelling is fairly phonemic orthography, phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English orthography, Engl ...

, with additional rules to account for the large phonetic inventory of Mazahua: *A diagonal strikethrough indicates a reduced vowel (these letters were added to

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

in 2016) *Underline indicates a

*An apostrophe indicates an ejective consonant or glottalic consonant *The letter ''j'' after a consonant indicates an aspirated consonant *The letter ''u'' after a consonant indicates

labialization Labialization is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound. The term is normally restricted to consonants. When vowels invol ...

Sample text

The following the first Article of the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an international document adopted by the United Nations General Assembly that enshrines the Human rights, rights and freedoms of all human beings. Drafted by a UN Drafting of the Universal D ...

(UDHR) into Mazahua:

References

Sources

*Knapp Ring, Michael Herbert, ''Fonología del mazahua'', Tesis de licenciatura, ENAH, México, 1996 *Michael Knapp, 2002 “Elementos de dialectología Mazahua" In ''Del Cora Al Maya Yucateco: Estudios Linguisticos Sobre Algunas Lenguas Indigenas Mexicanas'' Paulette Levy (Ed.), Universidad Nacional Autonoma De Mexico {{Incubator, code= maz/Nrrangoxti Indigenous languages of Mexico Mesoamerican languages Oto-Manguean languages Oto-Pamean languages Mazahua