Pochutec is an

extinct Extinction is the termination of an organism by the death of its Endling, last member. A taxon may become Functional extinction, functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to Reproduction, reproduce and ...

Uto-Aztecan The Uto-Aztecan languages are a family of native American languages, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The name of the language family reflects the common ...

language of the Nahuan (or Aztecan) branch which was spoken in and around the town of

Pochutla San Pedro Pochutla is a city and Municipalities of Oaxaca, municipality located in the south of Oaxaca state, in southeastern Mexico next to the Pacific Ocean and is the southernmost municipality in Oaxaca. It is an important commercial, transport ...

on the Pacific coast of

Oaxaca Oaxaca, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Oaxaca, is one of the 32 states that compose the political divisions of Mexico, Federative Entities of the Mexico, United Mexican States. It is divided into municipalities of Oaxaca, 570 munici ...

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 ...

. In 1917, it was documented in a monograph by

Franz Boas Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. He was a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the mov ...

, who considered the language nearly extinct. In the 1970s, another investigator found two speakers around Pochutla who still remembered a few of the words recorded by Boas.

Classification

In the early 20th century, scholars disagreed as to the origin of the language within the Nahuan family. Most thought Pochutec was distinct from Nahuatl, and this was proven in 1978, when Campbell and Langacker gave new arguments from Boas' data. Their conclusion was quickly accepted. Nahuan thus consists of Pochutec and "General Aztec", which consists of

Nahuatl Nahuatl ( ; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahuas, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller popul ...

and

Pipil Pipil may refer to: *Pipil people, Nahua people of western El Salvador *Pipil language (Nawat) **Pipil grammar **Pipil language (typological overview) {{Disambig ...

. Bartholomew (1980) suggests that some of the divergent traits, for example last syllable stress, are due to influence from Chatino, an Oto-Manguean language. She argues that at the time of the 16th century

Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire was a pivotal event in the history of the Americas, marked by the collision of the Aztec Triple Alliance and the Spanish Empire. Taking place between 1519 and 1521, this event saw the Spanish conquistad ...

the settlement of Pochutla did not fall under the Aztec Empire's domain, but instead was part of the

Mixtec The Mixtecs (), or Mixtecos, are Indigenous Mesoamerican peoples of Mexico inhabiting the region known as La Mixteca of Oaxaca and Puebla as well as La Montaña Region and Costa Chica of Guerrero, Costa Chica Regions of the state of Guerre ...

state centered at

Tututepec Tututepec (Mixtec languages, Mixtec: ''Yucu Dzaa'') is a Mesoamerica, Mesoamerican archaeological site. It is located in the lower Río Verde (Oaxaca), Río Verde valley on the coast of Mesoamerican geography#Oaxaca, Oaxaca. The city was the capita ...

. Thus, the Chatino linguistic influences stemmed from the trade and communication routes between Pochutla and Tututepec passing through Chatino territory. Dakin (1983) argues that the key correspondence sets used by Campbell and Langacker as evidence for the existence of a separate fifth vowel *ï evolving from pUA *u, their main basis for separating Pochutec from their "General Aztec", were actually later developments within Pochutec by which proto-Aztec *i and *e > o in closed syllables, and that the supposed contrast in final position in imperatives originally had had a following clitic. In a later article, Canger and Dakin (1985) identify a different, very systematic isogloss for the development of pUA *u that shows a basic split between Eastern Nahuatl dialects and the Central and Western periphery, including Pochutec, as exemplified in at least eight different cognate sets. This proposal is incompatible with Campbell and Langacker's proposal for the development of pUA *u.1985 Dakin thus classifies Pochutec as belonging to the Western branch of the Nahuan languages, rather than having split off from Nahuan before the basic East-West split.

Morphology

Pochutec is an

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes (word parts), each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglu ...

language, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several

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 ...

s strung together.

Example phrases

The following are sample phrases in Pochutec, accompanied by Spanish and English translations:

References

Bibliography

''IJAL'' = ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' *Bartholomew, Doris. 1980. ''Otomanguean influence on Pochutla Aztec''. IJAL 46.2 *Boas, Franz. 1917
El dialecto mexicano de Pochutla, Oaxaca
''IJAL'', 1:9-44. *Campbell, Lyle, and Ronald W. Langacker. 1978. Proto-Aztecan vowels: Part I. ''IJAL'', April 1978, 44(2):85-102. *Canger, Una. 1980. Five Studies Inspired by Nahuatl Verbs in -oa. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague no. 11. Copenhagen. *Canger, Una. 1988
Nahuatl Dialectology: A Survey and Some Suggestions.
''IJAL'', January 1988, 54(1):28-72. *Canger, Una. 2000. Stress in Nahuatl of Durango: whose stress?. In Eugene H. Casad and Thomas L. Willett, eds. ''Uto-Aztecan: structural, temporal, and geographic perspectives: papers in memory of Wick R. Miller''. Hermosillo, Mexico: UniSon (Universidad de Sonora, División de Humanidades y Bellas Artes). pp. 373–386. *Canger, Una, and Karen Dakin. 1985. "An inconspicuous basic split in Nahuatl". International Journal of American Linguistics. 54. 258-261. *Dakin, Karen. 1983. Proto-Aztecan Vowels and Pochutec: An Alternative Analysis. International Journal of American Linguistics 49.2.196-203. *Hasler, Juan. 1976. “La situación dialectológica del pochuteco", International Journal of American Linguistics 42. 3. 268-273. *Hasler, Juan. 1977. “El pochuteco en la dialectología nahua", Amerindia. 2. 47-70. *Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indigenas (INALI) ational Institute of Indigenous Languages, Mexico 14 January 2008
Catálogo de las Lenguas Indígenas Nacionales: Variantes Lingüísticas de México con sus autodenominaciones y referencias geoestadísticas.
atalog of the Indigenous Languages: Language variants of Mexico with their self-designations and geostatistical references*Knab, Tim. 1980. When Is a Language Really Dead: The Case of Pochutec. ''IJAL'', July 1980, 46(3):230-233 *Lastra, Yolanda. 1992. The present-day indigenous languages of Mexico: an overview
''International journal of the sociology of language'', 96:35-43
(available through a subscription database). *Peralta Ramírez, Valentín. 2005
El Nawat de la Costa del Golfo. Algunas Semejanzas y Diferencias Estructurales con el Náhuatl Central.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pochutec Language Agglutinative languages Nahuan languages Uto-Aztecan languages Indigenous languages of Mexico Mesoamerican languages Extinct languages of North America Languages extinct in the 20th century