The Tepecano language is an extinct Indigenous language of Mexico belonging to the

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-family. It was formerly spoken by a small group of people in Azqueltán (earlier Atzqueltlán),

Jalisco Jalisco, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Jalisco, is one of the 31 states which, along with Mexico City, comprise the 32 Political divisions of Mexico, Federal Entities of Mexico. It is located in western Mexico and is bordered by s ...

, a small village on the Río Bolaños in the far northern part of the state, just east of the territory of the Wixárika people. Most closely related to Southern Tepehuán of the state of

Durango Durango, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Durango, is one of the 31 states which make up the Political divisions of Mexico, 32 Federal Entities of Mexico, situated in the northwest portion of the country. With a population of 1,832,650 ...

, Tepecano was a Mesoamerican language and evinced many of the traits that define the

Mesoamerican Linguistic Area The Mesoamerican language area is a ''sprachbund'' containing many of the languages natively spoken in the cultural area of Mesoamerica. This sprachbund is defined by an array of syntactic, lexical and phonological traits as well as a number of et ...

. So far as is known, the last speaker of Tepecano was Lino de la Rosa (born September 22, 1895), who was still living as of February 1980. Research on Tepecano was first carried out by the American linguistic anthropologist

John Alden Mason John Alden Mason (January 14, 1885 – November 7, 1967) was an American archaeological anthropologist and linguist. Mason was born in Orland, Indiana, but grew up in Philadelphia's Germantown. He received his undergraduate degree from the Univ ...

in Azqueltán from 1911 to 1913. This work led to the publication of a

monograph A monograph is generally a long-form work on one (usually scholarly) subject, or one aspect of a subject, typically created by a single author or artist (or, sometimes, by two or more authors). Traditionally it is in written form and published a ...

ic grammatical sketch in 1916 as well as an article on native prayers in Tepecano that Mason had collected from

informants An informant (also called an informer or, as a slang term, a "snitch", "rat", "canary", "stool pigeon", "stoolie", "tout" or "grass", among other terms) is a person who provides privileged information, or (usually damaging) information inten ...

in 1918. Later, American linguist Dennis Holt conducted field research in 1965 and from 1979 to 1980, but his results have not yet been published.Dennis Holt, personal communication

Morphology

Tepecano 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.

Notes

Bibliography

* * * * {{Uto-Aztecan languages Agglutinative languages Piman languages Mesoamerican languages Extinct languages of North America Indigenous languages of Mexico Languages extinct in the 20th century 20th-century disestablishments in North America