Huave (also spelled Wabe) is a
language isolate
Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The num ...
spoken by the indigenous
Huave people
The Huave (also spelled Huavi or Wabi) are an indigenous people of Mexico. The autodenomination term used by the Huave themselves is ''Ikoots'' or ''Kunajts'' (the first-person inclusive pronoun, thus meaning "Us"), or ''Mareños'' (meaning "Sea Pe ...
on the Pacific coast of the
Mexican
Mexican may refer to:
Mexico and its culture
*Being related to, from, or connected to the country of Mexico, in North America
** People
*** Mexicans, inhabitants of the country Mexico and their descendants
*** Mexica, ancient indigenous people ...
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 ...
of
Oaxaca
Oaxaca ( , also , , from nci, Huāxyacac ), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Oaxaca ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Oaxaca), is one of the 32 states that compose the political divisions of Mexico, Federative Entities of Mexico. It is ...
. The language is spoken in four villages on the
Isthmus of Tehuantepec
The Isthmus of Tehuantepec () is an isthmus in Mexico. It represents the shortest distance between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. Before the opening of the Panama Canal, it was a major overland transport route known simply as the Te ...
, in the southeast of the state, by around 20,000 people (see table below).
Name of the language
The Huave people of
San Mateo del Mar, who call themselves ''Ikoots'', meaning "us," refer to their language as ''ombeayiiüts,'' meaning "our language". In San Francisco del Mar, the corresponding terms are ''Kunajts'' ("us") and ''umbeyajts'' ("our language"). The term "Huave" is thought to come from the
Zapotec languages
The Zapotec languages are a group of around 50 closely related indigenous languages of Mesoamerica, indigenous Mesoamerican languages that constitute a main branch of the Oto-Manguean languages, Oto-Manguean language family and which is spoken b ...
, meaning "people who rot in the humidity", according to the 17th-century Spanish historian
Burgoa. However, Martínez Gracida (1888) claims the meaning of the term means 'many people' in Isthmus Zapotec, interpreting ''hua'' as "abundant" and ''be'' as a shortened form of ''binni'' ("people"). The etymology of the term requires further investigation. Neither of the above etymologies is judged plausible by Isthmus Zapotec speakers.
Classification
Although genetic relationships between the Huave language and several language families have been proposed, none has been substantiated, and Huave continues to be considered an isolate (Campbell 1997 pg. 161). Paul Radin proposed a relationship between Huave and the
Mayan
Mayan most commonly refers to:
* Maya peoples, various indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and northern Central America
* Maya civilization, pre-Columbian culture of Mesoamerica and northern Central America
* Mayan languages, language family spoken ...
and
Mixe–Zoquean languages, and
Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh (; January 22, 1909 – July 20, 1967) was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics.
Swadesh was born in Massachusetts to Bessarabian Jewish immigrant parents. He completed bachelor's and mas ...
proposed a connection to the
Oto-Manguean languages
The Oto-Manguean or Otomanguean languages are a large family comprising several subfamilies of indigenous languages of the Americas. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the ...
that has been further investigated by Rensch (1976), but all proposals have been inconclusive.
An automated computational analysis (
ASJP
The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists ...
4) by Müller et al. (2013)
[Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ]
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'. found lexical similarities among Huave,
Totozoquean, and
Chitimacha
The Chitimacha ( ; or ) are a federally recognized tribe of Native Americans who live in the U.S. state of Louisiana, mainly on their reservation in St. Mary Parish near Charenton on Bayou Teche. They are the only Indigenous people in the s ...
. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the similarities could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.
Current use and status
While Huave is still in use in most domains of social life in at least one of the four villages where it is spoken, it is an
endangered language
An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...
. Recently, fieldwork and
revitalization projects have been carried out in the Huave communities by universities of different countries.
As of 2011, it is reported that teenagers have taken to
texting
Text messaging, or texting, is the act of composing and sending electronic messages, typically consisting of alphabetic and numeric characters, between two or more users of mobile devices, desktops/laptops, or another type of compatible compute ...
in Huave, so as to be able to communicate without their parents' knowing what they are saying. (The
Mexican Kickapoo
The Mexican Kickapoo ( es, Tribu Kikapú) are a binational Indigenous people, some of whom live both in Mexico and in the United States. In Mexico, they were granted land at Hacienda del Nacimiento near the town of Múzquiz in the state of Coahui ...
s’
whistled speech
Whistled languages use whistling to emulate speech and facilitate communication. A whistled language is a system of whistled communication which allows fluent whistlers to transmit and comprehend a potentially unlimited number of messages over l ...
was developed around 1915 for much the same reason.)
Also as of 2011, a radio station in San Mateo del Mar, Radio Ikoots, was broadcasting in Huave.
Phonology
Huave of San Mateo del Mar is partly tonal, distinguishing between high and low tone in penultimate syllables only. Huave is one of only two
Mesoamerican languages
Mesoamerican languages are the languages indigenous to the Mesoamerican cultural area, which covers southern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador and Nicaragua. The area is characterized by extensive linguistic ...
not to have a phonemic
glottal stop
The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents thi ...
(the other is
Purépecha
The Purépecha (endonym pua, P'urhepecha ) are a group of indigenous people centered in the northwestern region of Michoacán, Mexico, mainly in the area of the cities of Cherán and Pátzcuaro.
They are also known by the pejorative "Tarascan ...
).
The phonemic inventory, reconstructed for the common ancestor of the four existing Huave varieties as presented in Campbell 1997, is as follows:
*Consonants: (and as marginal phonemes)
*Vowels: (and, depending on the variety, vowel length, low and high tone, aspiration).
These phonemes are from the phonology of San Francisco del Mar Huave. The San Dionisio del Mar dialect has an additional vowel phoneme, /y/, cognate with /e/ in San Mateo.
Vowels: /i, e, u, o, ɑ/. All vowels have aspirated forms.
Grammar
Huave is similar to the
Mayan languages
The Mayan languagesIn linguistics, it is conventional to use ''Mayan'' when referring to the languages, or an aspect of a language. In other academic fields, ''Maya'' is the preferred usage, serving as both a singular and plural noun, and as ...
in being both morphologically and syntactically
ergative and consistently
head-marking
A language is head-marking if the grammatical marks showing agreement between different words of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads (or nuclei) of phrases, rather than on the modifiers or dependents. Many languages employ both head-marking ...
. It is less morphologically complex than Mayan languages, however, and usually each word has only a few
affix
In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ar ...
es.
There are obligatory categories on the
verb
A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...
of
absolutive
In grammar, the absolutive case (abbreviated ) is the case of nouns in ergative–absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of intransitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs in the translational equivalents of nominative– ...
person
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, ...
and
present
The present (or here'' and ''now) is the time that is associated with the events perception, perceived directly and in the first time, not as a recollection (perceived more than once) or a speculation (predicted, hypothesis, uncertain). It is ...
,
past
The past is the set of all events that occurred before a given point in time. The past is contrasted with and defined by the present and the future. The concept of the past is derived from the linear fashion in which human observers experience t ...
or
future
The future is the time after the past and present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the apparent nature of reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently ...
tense, plus additional categories of transitive subject, indefinite subject and
reflexive.
Complex sentences in Huave often juxtapose multiple verbs each inflected for the appropriate person. An interesting feature of Huave is that verbs meaning "give" can be used to produce
causative
In linguistics, a causative (abbreviated ) is a valency-increasing operationPayne, Thomas E. (1997). Describing morphosyntax: A guide for field linguists'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 173–186. that indicates that a subject either ...
meaning, whilst a verb meaning "come" is used to produce
purpose clauses (i.e. meaning "in order to" in English). There are other purpose clauses introduced by more ordinary particles in which the verb is inflected for a special subordinate mode.
Word order, like verb morphology, in Huave follows a fully ergative pattern. The basic word order can be expressed very simply as Ergative Verb Absolutive. This means that whilst in
transitive clauses the word order is
AVO, in
intransitive
In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb whose context does not entail a direct object. That lack of transitivity distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additionally, intransitive verbs are ...
clauses the word order is verb–subject (VS).
Adjective
In linguistics, an adjective (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that generally grammatical modifier, modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Tra ...
s and
demonstrative
Demonstratives (abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning depending on a particular frame ...
s can be placed either before or after the noun to which they refer, whilst
numerals obligatorily precede their nouns.
Reduplication
In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change.
The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edwa ...
is a very productive phonological process in Huave. The verb root is reduplicated and the newly formed word's meaning is an intensified or repeated version of the meaning of the base verb. Huave also contains some partial reduplication, where only part of the root is reduplicated (typically its final VC sequence). Unlike full reduplication, this process is not productive.
Dialects
![Huavetowns](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Huavetowns.png)
Huave is spoken in the four coastal towns of San Francisco del Mar, San Dionisio del Mar, San Mateo del Mar and Santa Catarina del Mar. The most vibrant speech community is in San Mateo del Mar which was fairly isolated until recently. Negative speakers' attitudes towards their language and a strong social pressure from the dominant
Spanish language
Spanish ( or , Castilian) is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from colloquial Latin spoken on the Iberian peninsula. Today, it is a world language, global language with more than 500 millio ...
are the main reasons for the endangerment of Huave.
Although considered separate languages by SIL according to the needs of literacy materials, Campbell (1997) considers them dialects of a single language.
INALI distinguishes two varieties, Eastern (Dionisio and Francisco) and Western (Mateo and Maria).
Sample of written Huave
Practical orthographies are currently in use by literate speakers in San Mateo, San Francisco, San Dionisio and Santa María del Mar. There is an effort going on by the Mexican INALI (National Institute for Indigenous Languages) to standardize the orthography together with speakers from all four communities.
The following text-sample is a passage from Cuentos Huaves III published by the
Instituto Lingüístico de Verano:
''Tambüw chüc ambiyaw chüc xicuüw,''
'Two ''compadres'' went to kill deer'
''ambiyaw chüc coy, nggwaj. Apiüng chüc nop:''
'and they went to kill rabbits. One (of them) said:'
''—Tabar combül, ambiyar coya, ambiyar xicuüwa, ambiyar püecha —aw chüc.''
'Let's go, ''compadre'', to kill rabbits, deer and ''chachalacas.
''—Nggo namb —aw chüc.''
'I won't go', he said'.
Notes
References
* Burgoa, Fray Francisco de. 1997
674
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Year 674 (Roman numerals, DCLXXIV) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. The denomination 674 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domi ...
''Geográfica Descripción de la parte septentrional del Polo Ártico de la América'', México, DF: Grupo Editorial Miguel Ángel Porrúa.
*
Campbell, Lyle
Lyle Richard Campbell (born October 22, 1942) is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of Indigenous languages of the Americas, indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in ...
, 1997, ''American Indian Languages – The historical linguistics of Native America'', Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics, Oxford University Press.
*
* Martínez Gracida, Manuel. 1904
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''Catálogo de la colección de antigüedades huavis''. México: Museo Nacional
* Suaréz, Jorge A, 1975, ''Estudios Huaves'', Collección Lingüistica 22 INAH, Mexico.
* Radin, P, 1929, "Huave Texts", ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 5, 1-56
* Rensch, Calvin R, 1976, "Oto-Manguean isoglosses" In ''Diachronic, areal and typological linguistics'', ed. Thomas Sebeok pp. 295–316. Mouton, The Hague.
*
*
External links
Comparative Huave Swadesh vocabulary listfrom Wiktionary
*
ttp://www.ling.upenn.edu/~mpak/huave2.html Information from the University of Pennsylvania about HuaveSociolinguistic information about Huave from UC Berkeley*
ttps://web.archive.org/web/20061106053531/http://cdi.gob.mx/ini/monografias/huaves.html Ethnographical description of the Huave people at the INI homepage(Spanish)
Huave, World Atlas of Language Structures Online
OLAC resources
OLAC resources in and about the San Mateo Del Mar Huave languageOLAC resources in and about the San Francisco Del Mar Huave languageOLAC resources in and about the San Dionisio Del Mar Huave languageOLAC resources in and about the Santa María Del Mar Huave language
{{DEFAULTSORT:Huave Language
Indigenous languages of Mexico
Mesoamerican languages
Endangered language isolates
Language isolates of North America
Endangered indigenous languages of the Americas