Jicaquean, also known as Tolan, is a small language family of

Honduras Honduras, officially the Republic of Honduras, is a country in Central America. The republic of Honduras is bordered to the west by Guatemala, to the southwest by El Salvador, to the southeast by Nicaragua, to the south by the Pacific Oce ...

. There are two attested Jicaquean languages, Tol (Eastern Jicaque) and Western Jicaque (Holt 1999), which Campbell (1997) reports were about as distant as English and Swedish. Only Tol survives.

Classification

Prior to an influential paper by Greenberg and Swadesh in 1953 Tol (a.k.a. Eastern Jicaque) was thought to be a language isolate, i.e., there existed no knowledge as to its possible genetic affinities. They argued that Tol should be added to the

Hokan The Hokan language family is a hypothetical grouping of a dozen small language families that were spoken mainly in California, Arizona and Baja California. Etymology The name ''Hokan'' is loosely based on the word for "two" in the various Hokan ...

stock, a large language stock, phylum or family, which was proposed by R. B. Dixon and Alfred D. Kroeber in 1913. In 1977, David Oltrogge proposed to link Tol to the extinct

Subtiaba language Subtiaba is an extinct Oto-Manguean language which was spoken on the Pacific slope of Nicaragua, especially in the Subtiaba district of León. Edward Sapir established a connection between Subtiaba and Tlapanec. When Lehmann wrote about it in 1 ...

of Nicaragua, and also to

Chontal of Oaxaca Tequistlatec, also called Chontal, are three close but distinct languages spoken or once spoken by the Chontal people of Oaxaca State, Mexico. Chontal was spoken by 6,000 or so people in 2020. Languages * Huamelultec (Lowland Oaxaca Chontal), ...

, also known as

Tequistlatec Tequistlatec was the Chontal language of Tequisistlán town, Oaxaca. Highland Oaxaca Chontal Highland Oaxaca Chontal, or Chontal de la Sierra de Oaxaca, is one of the Chontal languages of Oaxaca, Mexico. It is sometimes called ''Tequistlate ...

o. This indirectly amounted to a mere sub-classification, since all of the three languages in question were part of the proposed Hokan stock. A couple of years later, Campbell and Oltrogge published a reconstruction of Jicaquean phonemes, based on the available information on Western and Eastern Jicaque. In that same paper they expressed strong doubt in the Hokan affiliation of Tol and mild enthusiasm regarding the possible link to Chontal of Oaxaca, but stressed that much more information was needed to be able to say anything reasonable. More recently, Kaufman has expressed his continuing support of the Hokan affiliation of Tol. Granberry & Vescelius (2004) speculate that the extinct

Ciguayo language Ciguayo (Siwayo) was the language of the Samaná Peninsula of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic) at the time of the Spanish Conquest. The Ciguayos appear to have predated the agricultural Taino who inhabited much of the island. The language ...

of Hispaniola might have its most likely relatives in the Tolan languages.

Proto-language

Proto-Jicaque reconstructions by Campbell and Oltrogge (1980):Campbell, Lyle and David Oltrogge. 1980. Proto-Tol (Jicaque). ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 46: 205-223.

References

* Campbell, Lyle. (1979). "Middle American languages." In L. Campbell & M. Mithun (Eds.), ''The languages of native America: Historical and comparative assessment'' (pp. 902–1000). Austin: University of Texas Press. * Campbell, Lyle. (1997). ''American Indian Languages, The Historical Linguistics of Native America''. Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford UP. * Campbell, Lyle, and David Oltrogge (1980). "Proto-Tol (Jicaque)." ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', 46:205-223. * Granberry, Julian, and Gary Vescelius (2004). ''Languages of the Pre-Columbian Antilles.'' Birmingham: University of Alabama Press. * Greenberg, Joseph H., and Morris Swadesh (1953). "Jicaque as a Hokan Language." ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 19: 216-222. * Holt, Dennis. (1999). ''Tol (Jicaque)''. Languages of the World/Materials 170. Munich: LincomEuropa.

External links

Jicaquean basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
{{authority control Language families Hokan languages Indigenous languages of Mexico Indigenous languages of Central America Languages of Honduras br:Toleg hr:Jicaque Indijanci