San Jeronimo Acazulco Otomi, or Ocoyoacac Otomí, is a moribund and seriously endangered dialect of the
Otomi language
Otomi (; ) is an Oto-Pamean languages, Oto-Pamean language family spoken by approximately 240,000 indigenous Otomi people in the Mexican Plateau, central ''altiplano'' region of Mexico. Otomi consists of several closely related languages, many ...
spoken by a hundred or so people in the town of
San Jerónimo Acazulco in
Ocoyoacac,
Mexico State
The State of Mexico ( es, Estado de México; ), officially just Mexico ( es, México), is one of the administrative divisions of Mexico, 32 federal entities of the United Mexican States. Commonly known as Edomex (from ) to distinguish it from th ...
.
Only people born before c. 1950 are fluent, and all of them speak Spanish on a daily basis. Acazulco Otomi has been classified as Eastern Otomi by Lastra (2006). It is more conservative, and closer to
Eastern Highland Otomi
Sierra Otomi Highland Otomi (''Otomi de la Sierra'') is a dialect cluster of the Otomi language spoken in Mexico by ca. 70,000 people in the highlands of Eastern Hidalgo, Western Veracruz and Northern Puebla. The speakers themselves call the l ...
, than its neighboring
Tilapa Otomi
Tilapa Otomi is a seriously endangered native American language spoken by less than a dozen people in the village of Santiago Tilapa, between Toluca and the DF in Mexico State
The State of Mexico ( es, Estado de México; ), officially just M ...
. There are revitalization efforts underway.
Acazulco Otomi has
ejective consonant
In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some l ...
s as well as aspirated stops which correspond to fricatives in other varieties of Otomi, and is similar to reconstructions of the Proto-Otomi language.
See also
*
Otomi language dialects
*
Oto-Pamean languages
*
Indigenous languages of the Americas
Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large numbe ...
References
Sources
*
*
Hernández Green, N. (2015). Morfosintaxis verbal del otomí de Acazulco. Unpublished PhD thesis in Indoamerican Linguistics at the Centre for Research and High Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), Mexico.*Turnbull, R. (2016)
The phonetics and phonology of lexical prosody in San Jerónimo Acazulco Otomi Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 1-32.
*Hernández-Green, N. (2016). Registration Versus Applicative Constructions in Acazulco Otomi 1. International Journal of American Linguistics, 82(3), 353-383.
*Turnbull, Rory; Pharao Hansen, Magnus & Ditte Boeg Thomsen. 2011
How a moribund dialect can contribute to the bigger picture: Insights from Acazulco Otomíaudio of presentation
''Ndöö́ngüǘ yühǘ: Guía de aprendizaje principiante del idioma otomí de San Jerónimo Acazulco, Estado de México''
*Pharao Hansen, M., Hernández-Green, N., Turnbull, R., & Thomsen, D. B. (2016)
Life histories, language attitudes and linguistic variation: Navigating the micropolitics of language revitalization in an Otomí community in Mexico.
In Language Documentation and Revitalization in Latin American Contexts. De Gruyter Mouton.
*Pharao Hansen, Magnus. 2012.
Kinship in the Past Tense: Language, Care and Cultural Memory in a Mexican Community
*Pharao Hansen, Magnus; Turnbull, Rory & Ditte Boeg Thomsen. 2011
From academic salvage linguistics to community-based documentation in only three weeks: Report from a collective and interdisciplinary fieldwork on Acazulco Otomi
External links
* Audio recordings o
minimal pairs
an
vocabulary
in Acazulco Otomí in th
Mexican Languages Collection of Yolanda Lastra
in The Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America
Otomi language
Endangered Oto-Manguean languages
{{Oto-Manguean-lang-stub