Huehuetla Tepehua is a moribund
Tepehua language
Tepehua is a language cluster of Mexico, spoken across a number of central Mexican states by the Tepehua people. Tepehua is a Mesoamerican language and shows many of the traits which define the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area. Along with some 62 ...
spoken in
Huehuetla, northeastern
Hidalgo
Hidalgo may refer to:
People
* Hidalgo (nobility), members of the Spanish nobility
* Hidalgo (surname)
Places
Mexico
* Hidalgo (state), in central Mexico
* Hidalgo, Coahuila, a town in the north Mexican state of Coahuila
* Hidalgo, Nuevo Le� ...
,
Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...
. There are fewer than 1,500 speakers left according to
Susan Smythe Kung (2007).
Syntax
Word order tends to be VSO, although it can be SVO at times (Kung 2007).
Phonology
Consonants
The voiced stops /b/, /d/, and /g/, as well as the flap /ɾ/ and the trill /r/, appear only in loanwords and ideophones. In younger speakers, the uvular /q/ has merged with the glottal stop /ʔ/.
Vowels
Morphology
Huehuetla Tepehua has a large variety of affixes (Kung 2007).
;Valency-changing affixes
*Reflexive -kan
*Reciprocal laa-
*Dative -ni
*Causative maa-
*Instrumental puu-
*Comitative t'aa-
*Applicative
;Aspectual derivational affixes
*Inchoative ta-
*Imminent ti-
*Roundtrip kii-
*Ambulative
*Begin
*Desiderative
*Repetitive
*Again
*All
*Distal -chaa and Proximal
;Derivative affixes
*Agent nominalizer –nV7
*Non-agentive nominalizers –ti and -nti
*Deverbalizer -n
*Instrumental prefixes paa- and lhaa-
*Locative prefix puu-
*Applicative prefix
*Comitative prefix t'aa-
References
{{Reflist
* Kung, Susan Smythe. 2007
A Descriptive Grammar of Huehuetla Tepehua'. Ph.D. dissertation: The University of Texas at Austin.
Indigenous languages of Mexico
Mesoamerican languages
Totonacan languages