Cuitlatec, or Cuitlateco, is an extinct language of

Mexico Mexico (Spanish language, Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a List of sovereign states, country in the southern portion of North America. It is borders of Mexico, bordered to the north by the United States; to the so ...

, formerly spoken by an

indigenous people Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...

known as Cuitlatec.

Classification

Cuitlatec has not been convincingly classified as belonging to any

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in h ...

. It is believed to be a language isolate. In their controversial classification of the

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 nu ...

, Greenberg and Ruhlen include Cuitlatec in an expanded

Chibchan The Chibchan languages (also Chibchan, Chibchano) make up a language family indigenous to the Isthmo-Colombian Area, which extends from eastern Honduras to northern Colombia and includes populations of these countries as well as Nicaragua, Costa ...

language family (

Macro-Chibchan Macro-Chibchan is a proposed grouping of the languages of the Lencan, Misumalpan, and Chibchan families into a single large phylum (macrofamily). History The Lencan and Misumalpan languages were once included in the Chibchan family proper, but ...

), along with a variety of other Mesoamerican and South American languages. Escalante Hernández suggests a possible relation to the

Uto-Aztecan languages 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 ...

Geographic distribution

Cuitlatec was spoken in the

state State may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''State Magazine'', a monthly magazine published by the U.S. Department of State * ''The State'' (newspaper), a daily newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, United States * ''Our S ...

Guerrero Guerrero is one of the 32 states that comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 81 municipalities and its capital city is Chilpancingo and its largest city is Acapulcocopied from article, GuerreroAs of 2020, Guerrero the pop ...

. By the 1930s, Cuitlatec was spoken only in San Miguel Totolapan. The last speaker of the language, Juana Can, is believed to have died in the 1960s. In 1979, only two elderly women, Florentina Celso and Apolonia Robles, were able to remember about fifty words of the language.

Phonology

Consonants

*The sounds , , , and are found in

loan word A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because the ...

s from

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

Vowels

Grammar

Sentences generally follow SVO word order.

Adjective In linguistics, an adjective ( abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ...

s precede the nouns they modify.

References

Bibliography

* Susana Drucker, Roberto Escalante, & Roberto J. Weitlaner. 1969. The Cuitlatec. In Evon Z. Vogt, ed., ''Handbook of Middle American Indians, Ethnology'': Vol 7, Chapter 30.

University of Texas Press The University of Texas Press (or UT Press) is a university press that is part of the University of Texas at Austin. Established in 1950, the Press publishes scholarly books and journals in several areas, including Latin American studies, Te ...

, Austin: 565-575 * McQuown, Norman A. 1945. Fonémica del Cuitlateco. ''El México Antiguo'' 5: 239-254. * Weitlaner, Roberto J. 1939. Notes on the Cuitlatec language. ''El México Antiguo'' 4: 363-373.

External links

Cuitlatec word list on Wiktionary
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cuitlatec Language Mesoamerican languages Extinct languages of North America Indigenous languages of Mexico Language isolates of North America Subject–object–verb languages Languages extinct in the 1960s Guerrero