Pochutec is an extinct

Uto-Aztecan Uto-Aztecan, Uto-Aztekan or (rarely in English) Uto-Nahuatl is a family of indigenous languages of the Americas, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The na ...

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

Oaxaca ) , population_note = , population_rank = 10th , timezone1 = CST , utc_offset1 = −6 , timezone1_DST = CDT , utc_offset1_DST = −5 , postal_code_type = Postal ...

Mexico Mexico ( Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guate ...

. 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 a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical ...

, 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. 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 Nahua peoples, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have small ...

and Pipil. 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, also known as the Conquest of Mexico or the Spanish-Aztec War (1519–21), was one of the primary events in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. There are multiple 16th-century narratives of the eve ...

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 Regions of the state of Guerrero. The Mixtec Cultur ...

state centered at Tututepec. 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, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...

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

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone ar ...

s strung together.

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