Tepehuán (Tepehuano) is the name of three closely related languages of the
Piman branch of 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, all spoken in northern
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 ...
. The language is called O'otham by its speakers.
Internal classification
* Tepehuán
** Northern Tepehuán
** Southern Tepehuán
*** Southeastern Tepehuán
*** Southwestern Tepehuán
Northern Tepehuán
Northern Tepehuán is spoken by about 10,000 people (2020 census)
[ in several settlements in Guadalupe y Calvo and Guachochi, Chihuahua, as well as in the north 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 ...
.
Southern Tepehuán
Southern Tepehuán is spoken by about 45,000 people,[ about equally divided into:
*Southeastern Tepehuán in Mezquital Municipio in 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 ...
.
*Southwestern Tepehuán in southwestern Durango.
Southern Tepehuán coexists with the Mexicanero language; there is some intermarriage between the two ethnic groups, and a number of speakers are trilingual in Mexicanero, Tepehuán and Spanish.
Media
Tepehuán-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio stations XEJMN-AM, broadcasting from Jesús María, Nayarit, and XETAR, based in Guachochi, Chihuahua.
Morphology
Tepehuán 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, in which 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.
Phonology
Northern Tepehuan
The following is representative of the Northern dialect of Tepehuan.
Vowels
Consonants
Nasal consonants /n, ɲ/ become when preceding a velar consonant.
Southern Tepehuan
The following is representative of the Southeastern dialect of Tepehuan.
Vowels
Consonants
/v/ is sometimes realized as in word-final position. /l/ appears only in loanwords from Spanish.
Sample Tepehuan Text
Northern Tepehuan:
Southeastern Tepehuan:
Further reading
*
References
Piman languages
Agglutinative languages
Critically endangered languages
Indigenous languages of Mexico
Indigenous languages of the North American Southwest
Mesoamerican languages
Vulnerable languages
Tepehuán
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