The Mixtecan languages constitute a 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 of

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 ...

. They include the Trique (or Triqui) languages, spoken by about 24,500 people; Cuicatec, spoken by about 15,000 people; and the large expanse of Mixtec languages, spoken by about 511,000 people. The relationship between Trique, Cuicatec, and Mixtec, is an open question. Unpublished research by

Terrence Kaufman Terrence Kaufman (1937 – March 3, 2022) was an American linguist specializing in documentation of unwritten languages, lexicography, Mesoamerican historical linguistics and language contact phenomena. He was an emeritus professor of linguistic ...

in the 1980s supported grouping Cuicatec and Mixtec together.

Proto-Mixtecan

The ''

urheimat In historical linguistics, the homeland or ( , from German 'original' and 'home') of a proto-language is the region in which it was spoken before splitting into different daughter languages. A proto-language is the reconstructed or historicall ...

'' of the Oto-Manguean family may be the valley of Tehuacán in

Puebla Puebla, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Puebla, is one of the 31 states that, along with Mexico City, comprise the Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 217 municipalities and its capital is Puebla City. Part of east-centr ...

state. This site was one of the places of the domestication of

maize Maize (; ''Zea mays''), also known as corn in North American English, is a tall stout grass that produces cereal grain. It was domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago from wild teosinte. Native American ...

. The thousand-year presence of Oto-Manguean-speaking groups in this region makes it probable that they were active in this domestication process, which favored the inhabitants of the Altiplano's transition to a sedentary lifestyle and thus influenced the development of Mesoamerican civilization. Campbell and Kaufman have proposed that the Oto-Manguean languages began to diverge about 1500 BCE. The difficulty of establishing more general relationships between the eight subgroups of the family presents a difficulty for making more detailed inferences on the historical development of the languages. Proto-Oto-Manguean has been reconstructed by Robert E. Longacre and Calvin Rensch. The phonological system of the proto-language has nine consonants, four vowels, and four tones. The groups of consonants and the diphthongs formed from this limited repertory would have been the origin of the phonemes in the daughter proto-languages of the various subgroups of Proto-Oto-Manguean. Some of the most significant changes in the diversification of Proto-Oto-Manguean phonemes into Proto-Mixtecan phonemes are the following: Rensch revised the reconstruction work of Longacre. He revised the probable phonological inventory and described some of his proposals, based on comparisons of the cognates in the Mixtecan languages. After this work, he proposed a reconstruction of the phonological system of Proto-Mixtecan. This proposal contains sixteen consonants, four vowels, and four tones. Longacre (1957) had reconstructed the following consonant inventory for Proto-Mixtecan:Silverman, 1993, p. 109

References

* Longacre, Robert E. 1957. Proto-Mixtecan. ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 23(4):1–195.

Proto-Mixtecan

References

Further reading

See also