The

Miskito language Miskito ( in the Miskito language) is a Misumalpan language spoken by the Miskito people in northeastern Nicaragua, especially in the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region, and in eastern Honduras. With around 150,000 speakers, Miskito is th ...

, the language of the

Miskito people The Miskitos are an Afro-Indigenous ethnic group in Central America. Their territory extends from Cabo Camarón, Cape Camarón, Honduras, to Río Grande de Matagalpa, Nicaragua, along the Mosquito Coast, in the Western Caribbean zone. The Miski ...

of the Atlantic coast of

Nicaragua Nicaragua, officially the Republic of Nicaragua, is the geographically largest Sovereign state, country in Central America, comprising . With a population of 7,142,529 as of 2024, it is the third-most populous country in Central America aft ...

and

Honduras Honduras, officially the Republic of Honduras, is a country in Central America. It is bordered to the west by Guatemala, to the southwest by El Salvador, to the southeast by Nicaragua, to the south by the Pacific Ocean at the Gulf of Fonseca, ...

, is a member of the Misumalpan language family and also a strongly Germanic-influenced language. Miskito is as widely spoken in Honduras and Nicaragua as Spanish, it is also an official language in the Atlantic region of these countries. With more than 8 million speakers, Miskito has positioned in the second place in both countries after Spanish. Miskito is not only spoken in Central America, but in Europe (United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, France and Italy), the USA, Canada and in many other Latin American countries. Miskito used to be a royal state language in the 16th to 19th dynasties of the Miskito Kingdom.

Miskito alphabet

The Miskito alphabet is the same as the English alphabet. It has 21 consonants and 5 vowels. A (a), B (be), C (ce), D (de), E (e), F (ef), G (ge), H (ha), I (i), J (jei), K (ka), L (el), M (em), N (en), O (o), P (pi), Q (ku), R (ar), S (es), T (te), U (yoo), V (vee), W (dubilu), X (eks), Y (yei), Z (zet).

Phonology

Phonemes

*The exact status of

vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many ...

is not clear; long vowels are not consistently indicated in Miskito writing.

Suprasegmentals

Word stress is generally on the first

syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

of each word.

Phonotactics

Noun phrase

Determiners and quantifiers

Ligature

Ligature is a term (with precedents in other languages) for describing a grammatical feature of Miskito traditionally referred to with less accuracy in the Miskito context as ' construct'. A ligature is a

morpheme A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...

(often ''-ka'') which occurs when a noun is linked to some other element in the

noun phrase A noun phrase – or NP or nominal (phrase) – is a phrase that usually has a noun or pronoun as its head, and has the same grammatical functions as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently ...

. In Miskito, most of the elements that require the presence of ligature are ones that precede the head noun: Ligature takes a variety of forms: Some nouns take no ligature morpheme; these mostly denote parts of the body (e.g. ''bila'' 'mouth', ''napa'' 'tooth', ''kakma'' 'nose') or kinship (e.g. ''lakra'' 'opposite-sex sibling'), although there is only an imperfect correlation between membership of this morphological class and

semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

inalienability (see also relationals below).

Possession

The plural

Adjectives

Pronouns and adverbs

The

personal pronouns Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it''). Personal pronouns may also take different for ...

differentiate three

persons A person (: people or persons, depending on context) is a being who has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such ...

and also have an exclusive/inclusive distinction in the first person plural. The general

plural In many languages, a plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated as pl., pl, , or ), is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than ...

morpheme ''nani'' or -nan is added to form plurals (except with ''yawan''). Use of these pronouns is optional when person is indexed in the possessed form, relational or verb group. The pronouns are not case-specific, and may, under comparable conditions, be marked by the same postpositions as other noun phrases.

Postpositions

Relationals

Relationals are quasi-nouns expressing some relationship (often spatial) to their possessor complement. Many of the relationals perceivably originate in

locative In grammar, the locative case ( ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which indicates a location. In languages using it, the locative case may perform a function which in English would be expressed with such prepositions as "in", "on", "at", and " ...

s (in ''-ra'') of nouns designating parts of the body employed metaphorically to convey spatial or other relations.

Verbal groups

Overview

Finite forms include several tenses and moods, in each of which the

person A person (: people or persons, depending on context) is a being who has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations suc ...

(but not

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The most basic examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...

) of the subject is marked by

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...

es. The tenses themselves have characteristic suffixes which combine with the subject-indexing suffixes. In addition to synthetic (simple) tenses, there is also a considerable range of periphrastic (compound) tenses. These are formed with a non-finite form of the main verb followed by an

auxiliary verb An auxiliary verb ( abbreviated ) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or ...

. Some of the synthetic tenses represent original periphrastic tense structures that have become welded into single words. This helps to explain why there are two different forms each in the present, past and future. (The sample verb used is ''pulaia'' 'play', stem ''pul-'', given here in the third-person form of each tense.) In addition to a subject index which form part of a verb's suffix, for transitive verbs the verb group includes an object index in the form of a preverbal particle marking the person (but not the number) of the

object Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an a ...

. The subject markers vary somewhat according to the tense, but the most usual forms are shown in the following table (see below for more details).

Conjugation

The stem of a verb is obtained by removing the ''-aia'' suffix from the infinitive. Most verb stems end in a consonant, and are conjugated as follows (our sample verb is ''pulaia'' 'play'). Verbs whose stems end in ''i'' (''bri-'' 'have', ''wi-'' 'tell', ''pi-'' 'eat', ''di-'' 'drink', ''swi-'' 'allow') vary from the above paradigm in a few minor points. ''Bal-aia'' 'come' and ''w-aia'' 'go', have an irregular Present I tense. The verb ''yabaia'' 'give' is anomalous in a different way by having irregularly derived non-third-person object-indexing forms. Finally, the most irregular verb of all is the defective and irregular ''kaia'' 'to be'.

Use of tenses

Switch reference and non-finite verb forms

Periphrastic tenses

The range of aspectual, modal and other notions that can be expressed is enlarged considerably by the availability of various

periphrastic In linguistics and literature, periphrasis () is the use of a larger number of words, with an implicit comparison to the possibility of using fewer. The comparison may be within a language or between languages. For example, "more happy" is periph ...

constructions in which a verb acting as auxiliary is placed after the main verb. The conjugated component can take a variety of tenses, including periphrastic ones, and the periphrases themselves may often be combined; thus chains of several auxiliaries are possible. Some representative examples of such periphrases follow:

Syntax

Word order

Propositional structure

While no systematic case marking differentiates formally between subjects and objects, there exist (apart from word order) certain option for achieving disambiguation.

Information structure

A system of specialized

postposition Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complemen ...

s is used to identify topics and focused constituents:

Valency

Most verbs are built up from a monosyllabic lexical root ending in a vowel or a single consonant, to which an extension or stem consonant is very often added. The extensions correlate with transitivity: transitive stems have either ''-k-'' or ''-b-'' (unpredictably), while intransitive stems have ''-w-''. There is also a valency-decreasing verb-prefix ''ai-'' which, added to transitive stems, produces unergative, reflexive, reciprocal or middle verbs. See the section on Derivation (below) for examples.

Negation

Questions

Sentence mood particles

Coordinating conjunctions

Relative clauses

There are two major constructions which may be used to form

relative clause A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments in the relative clause refers to the noun or noun phrase. For example, in the sentence ''I met a man who wasn ...

s in Miskito, the 'external head' strategy and the 'internal head' strategy.

Complement clauses

Conditional and concessive clauses

Circumstantial clauses

Lexicon

General

As regards origin, the Miskito

lexicon A lexicon (plural: lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word () ...

consists of the following principal components: * words of native Miskito origin; * a considerable number of loans from surrounding languages of the related Sumo group; * a large number of loan words from English; * a smaller number of words borrowed from Spanish.

Derivation

Some derivational affixes:

Lexical compounds

Typological overview

Phonology

Phoneme inventory

The Miskito

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 includes four vowels (''a, e, i, o, u''), apparently with phonemic length playing a part. Consonant series include voiced and voiceless plosives, voiced nasals and semivowels, two liquids and the fricative ''s''. Orthographic ''h'' apparently represents a suprasegmental feature.

Other aspects

Syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

s consist of a

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

nucleus preceded and followed by a maximum of two

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

: (C)(C)V(C)(C). Word stress is normally on the first syllable and not distinctive.

Morphology

Inflectional and derivational morphology are of moderate complexity and predominantly suffixing, together with the use of infixes in the nominal paradigm.

Nominal morphology

The nominal morphological categories are ligature and

(but not

) of the possessor, the exponents of which have suffix and infix allophones, except for third person and first person inclusive possessor indices, which are preposed

particles In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscle in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from s ...

. Plural number is indicated by a postpositive particle.

Verbal morphology

In the

verb A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic f ...

al morphology, tense, mood and

(of the subject) are marked by

es (and sometimes fused into

portmanteau In linguistics, a blend—also known as a blend word, lexical blend, or portmanteau—is a word formed by combining the meanings, and parts of the sounds, of two or more words together.

suffix forms).

Object Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an a ...

indices of transitive verbs are represented by particles preceding the verb (third person is zero). Number is not marked in these subject and object indices, but a plural subject may be indicated through a verbal periphrasis serving this function.

Syntax

Word order

Sentence order is predominantly SOV. Auxiliaries follow main verbs. Sentence particles are sentence-final. Within the

, most

determiner Determiner, also called determinative ( abbreviated ), is a term used in some models of grammatical description to describe a word or affix belonging to a class of noun modifiers. A determiner combines with a noun to express its reference. Examp ...

s precede the

head A head is the part of an organism which usually includes the ears, brain, forehead, cheeks, chin, eyes, nose, and mouth, each of which aid in various sensory functions such as sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Some very simple ani ...

, but articles follow it, as do quantifiers.

Adjective An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...

s may either precede or follow the head noun. Possessors precede possessed, and

s precede their head. The ligature morpheme generally occurs on the noun whenever this is preceded by one of the items mentioned, and also when it takes a possessive index.

Postposition Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complemen ...

al structures are found.

Head or dependent marking

Miskito is consistently head-marking. There is

pro-drop A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a language in which certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they can be pragmatically or grammatically inferable. The precise conditions vary from language to language, and can be quite ...

for both subject and object (i.e. subject and object pronouns are commonly omitted). The finite verb's subject

argument An argument is a series of sentences, statements, or propositions some of which are called premises and one is the conclusion. The purpose of an argument is to give reasons for one's conclusion via justification, explanation, and/or persu ...

is indexed for

(not for

) on the verb. Transitive verbs also index their object through pre-verbal particles (zero for third person). A maximum of one such object index is possible. If a transitive verb has both a

patient A patient is any recipient of health care services that are performed by Health professional, healthcare professionals. The patient is most often Disease, ill or Major trauma, injured and in need of therapy, treatment by a physician, nurse, op ...

and a recipient, the latter is not indexed and appears as a postpositional phrase (indirect object). The expression of nominal

possessive A possessive or ktetic form (Glossing abbreviation, abbreviated or ; from ; ) is a word or grammatical construction indicating a relationship of possession (linguistics), possession in a broad sense. This can include strict ownership, or a numbe ...

genitive In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can ...

relations is similarly head-marking: the head (i.e. the possessed) is marked with indices indicating the person of the dependent (the possessor), the noun phrase expressing which is either omitted normally if pronominal (a pro-drop phenomenon) or precedes the head, e.g. ''arask-i'' 'my horse' (or ''yang arask-i''), ''araska'' 'his horse' (zero-marked possessor), ''Juan araska'' 'Juan's horse' (cf. ''aras'' 'horse' without ligature).

Adposition Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complemen ...
s

Other relations between a verb and its noun phrase complements or

adjuncts In brewing, adjuncts are unmalted grains (such as barley, wheat, maize, rice, rye, and oats) or grain products used in brewing beer which supplement the main mash ingredient (such as malted barley). This is often done with the intention of cut ...

are expressed by means of

al structures or relational constructions. Postpositions are invariable and follow the noun phrase, e.g. ''Nicaragua ra'' 'in/to Nicaragua'. A relational construction has the internal form of a possessive construction (above), except that the place of the head noun is occupied by a quasi-noun called a relational; the latter is often followed by a postpositon. E.g. ''nin-i-ra'' (or ''yang ninira'') 'behind me', ''nina-ra'' (or ''witin ninara'') 'behind him', ''Juan nina-ra'' 'behind Juan', where the relational ''nina'' imitates a possessed noun.

Predication, sentence types and compound and complex sentences

There is a copula with an irregular and defective conjugational paradigm.

Negation In logic, negation, also called the logical not or logical complement, is an operation (mathematics), operation that takes a Proposition (mathematics), proposition P to another proposition "not P", written \neg P, \mathord P, P^\prime or \over ...

is achieved through various constructions. One is the use of the verb's negative participle, which is invariable for person and tense; another is through use of a negative particle ''apia'' which follows verbs (in the future only), but precedes the copula. Yes–no questions have no special grammatical marking as such, but all kinds of questions are optionally followed by the sentence particle ''ki''. Other sentence particles express different modal nuances. Verbs or whole clauses may be conjoined by

juxtaposition Juxtaposition is an act or instance of placing two opposing elements close together or side by side. This is often done in order to Comparison, compare/contrast the two, to show similarities or differences, etc. Speech Juxtaposition in literary ...

, all but the last verb in the chain adopting the form of a switch reference participle. These vary in form depending on whether the following verb has the same or a different subject, and also depending on certain tense or aspect relations, and on the person of the subject in the case of different-subject participles. Besides these widely used constructions, clauses may also be linked by coordinating conjunctions, and subordinate clauses may be marked by a clause-final subordinator.

References

* Richter, Elke (no date). ''Observaciones acerca del desarrollo lexical miskito en Nicaragua''

* Salamanca, Danilo (no date). ''Gramática escolar del Miskito/Manual de Gramática del Miskito''. Draft version formerly on the Internet. *Salamanca, Danilo (2008). ''EI idioma miskito: estado de la lengua y características tipológicas''. *Ramsin S., Felix (2021). Writer, Modern Miskito Grammar specialist. *M. Brown, Dionisio. Writer, Miskito Grammar specialist.

External links

Ethnologue
by Danilo Salamanca

(PROEL: Promotora Española de Lingüística) — short page in Spanish containing several errors
Gospel Recordings Network: Miskito
— sound recordings
A Lexicographic Study of Ulwa
by Thomas Michael Green
Dictionary of the Ulwa Language
(includes sentences translated into Miskito)
''Miskitu Aisas'' (an unfinished Miskito course at Wikibooks)
{{authority control Miskito, Grammar Native American grammars Misumalpan languages Indigenous languages of Central America

Miskito alphabet

Phonology

Phonemes

Suprasegmentals

Phonotactics

Noun phrase

Determiners and quantifiers

Ligature

Possession

The plural

Adjectives

Pronouns and adverbs

Postpositions

Relationals

Verbal groups

Overview

Conjugation

Use of tenses

Switch reference and non-finite verb forms

Periphrastic tenses

Syntax

Word order

Propositional structure

Information structure

Valency

Negation

Questions

Sentence mood particles

Coordinating conjunctions

Relative clauses

Complement clauses

Conditional and concessive clauses

Circumstantial clauses

Lexicon

General

Derivation

Lexical compounds

Typological overview

Phonology

Phoneme inventory

Other aspects

Morphology

Nominal morphology

Verbal morphology

Syntax

Word order

Head or dependent marking

Adposition Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complemen ...s

Predication, sentence types and compound and complex sentences

See also

References

External links

Adposition Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complemen ...
s