The Mesoamerican language area is a ''

sprachbund A sprachbund (, lit. "language federation"), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. The lang ...

'' containing many of the languages natively spoken in the cultural area of

Mesoamerica Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area in southern North America and most of Central America. It extends from approximately central Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica. W ...

. This sprachbund is defined by an array of syntactic, lexical and phonological traits as well as a number of ethnolinguistic traits found in the

languages of Mesoamerica 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 linguis ...

, which belong to a number of language families, such as

Uto-Aztecan 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 ...

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 ...

, Totonacan,

Oto-Manguean 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 ...

and

Mixe–Zoque languages The Mixe–Zoque (also: Mixe–Zoquean, Mije–Soke, Mije–Sokean) languages are a language family whose living members are spoken in and around the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico. The Mexican government recognizes three distinct Mixe–Zoquean ...

as well as some

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 ...

s and unclassified languages known to the region.

History of Mesoamerican areal linguistics

The similarities noted between many of the languages of Mesoamerica have led linguistic scholars to propose the constitution of a sprachbund, from as early as 1959. The proposal was not consolidated until 1986, however, when

Lyle Campbell 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 ...

Terrence Kaufman Terrence Kaufman (1937 – March 3, 2022) was an American linguist specializing in documentation of unwritten languages, lexicography, Mesoamerican historical linguistics and language contact phenomena. He was an emeritus professor of linguist ...

and Thomas Smith-Stark employed a rigid linguistic analysis to demonstrate that the similarities between a number of languages were indeed considerable, with the conclusion that their origins were very likely caused by diffusion rather than inheritance, the standard criteria for defining a sprachbund. In their 1986 paper "Meso-America as a Linguistic Area" the above authors explored several proposed areal features of which they discarded most as being weakly attested, possibly by chance or inheritance or not confined to the Mesoamerican region. However, five traits in particular were shown to be widely attested among the languages, with boundaries coinciding with that of the Mesoamerican region and having a probable origin through diffusion. They then compared the five traits with the traits defining other language areas considered to be well-established, like the

Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area is a sprachbund including languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Kra–Dai, Austronesian and Austroasiatic families spoken in an area stretching from Thailand to China. Neighbou ...

and Balkan language area. They concluded that by comparison the proposed Mesoamerican language area could indeed be considered a well-founded area: arguably "among the very strongest that are known" (Campbell, Kaufman & Smith-Stark. 1986 p. 556). They also argued that some of the discarded traits might also be taken into consideration as strengthening the proposal, but they were not sufficient by themselves to act as foundation and other well-documented traits of a more

ethnolinguistic Ethnolinguistics (sometimes called cultural linguistics) is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies the relationship between a language and the nonlinguistic cultural behavior of the people who speak that language. __NOTOC__ Examples ...

character might not be considerable as traits that are linguistic but cultural.

Traits defining the Mesoamerican language area

The following is a brief description of the linguistic traits considered by Campbell, Kaufman and Smith-Stark as defining the Mesoamerican language area.

Nominal possession

Many of the Mesoamerican languages show a particular kind of construction for possession of nominals. The commonly found construction is ''"his noun1 noun2"'' meaning ''"noun2's noun1"'' ("his" often is a prefix in this construction). For example, in the

Kʼicheʼ language Kʼicheʼ (, also known as among its speakers), or Quiché (), is a Mayan language of Guatemala, spoken by the Kʼicheʼ people of the central highlands. With over a million speakers (some 7% of Guatemala's population), Kʼicheʼ is the secon ...

, a

Mayan language 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 ...

, "the man's dog" literally means "his-dog the man". The similar construction in

Nahuatl Nahuatl (; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahua peoples, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller ...

would be .

Relational nouns

Another trait shared by nearly all Mesoamerican languages is

relational noun Relational nouns or relator nouns are a class of words used in many languages. They are characterized as functioning syntactically as nouns, although they convey the meaning for which other languages use adpositions (i.e. prepositions and postposit ...

s. Relational nouns are used to express spatial and other relations, much like prepositions in most

Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...

but composed of a noun and possessive affixes. :For example in

Pipil Pipil may refer to: *Nahua people of western El Salvador *Pipil language Nawat (academically Pipil, also known as Nicarao) is a Nahuan language native to Central America. It is the southernmost extant member of the Uto-Aztecan family. It was spo ...

(Uto-Aztecan): :''nu-wa:n'' "with me" (''nu''- means "my") :''mu-wa:n'' "with you" (''mu''- means "yours") :''i-wa:n'' "with her" (''i''- means "his/her/its") :Or in Mam (Mayan): :''n-wits-a'' "on me" (''n''- means "my") :''t-wits'' "on her" (''t''- means "his/her/its").

Pied-piping with inversion

Pied-piping with inversion Pied-piping with inversion is a special word order phenomenon found in some languages, for example, languages in the Mesoamerican linguistic area. Introduction The phenomenon was first named and identified as an areal characteristic of the Meso ...

is a special word order found in wh-questions. It appears to be found in all Mesoamerican languages, but is rare outside Mesoamerica.

Vigesimal numeral system

All the languages of Mesoamerica have

vigesimal vigesimal () or base-20 (base-score) numeral system is based on twenty (in the same way in which the decimal numeral system is based on ten). '' Vigesimal'' is derived from the Latin adjective '' vicesimus'', meaning 'twentieth'. Places In ...

, or base twenty numeral systems. This system has also spread to some languages just outside the Mesoamerican cultural area.

Non-verb-final syntax and absence of switch-reference

No language with verb-final basic word order is attested in Mesoamerica even though most of the languages bordering on Mesoamerica are verb final ( SOV). Also no languages with

switch reference In linguistics, switch-reference (SR) describes any clause-level morpheme that signals whether certain prominent arguments in 'adjacent' clauses are coreferential. In most cases, it marks whether the subject of the verb in one clause is corefe ...

are attested in Mesoamerica, but this is supposed by Campbell, Kaufman and Smith-Stark to be a secondary effect of the Mesoamerican languages not being verb final.

Widespread semantic calques

A strong evidence of diffusion throughout Mesoamerica is provided by a number of semantic

calques In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language whi ...

widely found throughout the area. For example, in many Mesoamerican languages the words for specific objects are constructed by compounding two different stems, and in many cases these two stems are semantically identical although linguistically unrelated. Among these calques are: *''leg-head'' meaning "knee" *''deer-snake'' meaning "boa constrictor" *''stone-ash'' meaning "limestone" *''hand-neck'' meaning "wrist" *''bird-stone'' meaning "egg" *''blood-road'' meaning "vein" *''grind-stone'' meaning "molar" *''mouth'' meaning "edge" *''god-excrement or sun-excrement'' meaning "precious metal" *''hand-mother'' meaning "thumb" *''water-mountain'' meaning "town"

Other traits

Other traits found in Mesoamerican languages, but not found by Campbell, Kaufman and Smith-Stark to be prominent enough to be conclusive for the proposal of the language area are: * incorporation of bodypart nouns into verbs *derivation of

locative case In grammar, the locative case (abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which indicates a location. It corresponds vaguely to the English prepositions "in", "on", "at", and "by". The locative case belongs to the general local cases, together with the ...

forms from bodypart nounsThe anthology edited by Lourdes de Leon and Thomas B Haviland deals extensively with the subject of likenesses and differences in spatial description in different

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 ...

* *

whistled language 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 ...

s *grammatical indication of

inalienable possession In linguistics, inalienable possession (abbreviated ) is a type of possession in which a noun is obligatorily possessed by its possessor. Nouns or nominal affixes in an inalienable possession relationship cannot exist independently or be "alie ...

numeral classifiers A classifier (abbreviated or ) is a word or affix that accompanies nouns and can be considered to "classify" a noun depending on the type of its referent. It is also sometimes called a measure word or counter word. Classifiers play an importan ...

*grammatical polite forms for second person addressees *a special ritual language register

Notes

References

*Lyle Campbell, Terrence Kaufman & Thomas Smith-Stark. 1986. Meso-America as a linguistic area. In: Language 62, No. 3: 530-558 *Thomas C. Smith-Stark. 1994. Mesoamerican calques. I: Carolyn J. MacKay & Verónica Vázquez. Investigaciones lingüisticas en Mesoamérica. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México: 15–50. *Lourdes de Léon and Stephen C. Levinson. 1992. Spatial Description in Mesoamerican Languages. Introduction. Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 45:527-29. *Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1992. "Left" and "Right" in Tenejapa: Investigating a Linguistic and Conceptual Gap. In Léon, Lourdes de and Stephen C. Levinson. 590–611. *Levy, Paulette. 1992. Body Part Prefixes in Papantla Totonac. In Lourdes de Léon and Stephen C. Levinson: 530-542 *Veerman-Leichsenring, Annette. 1992. Body Part Terms occurring in Popolocan Verbs. In Lourdes de Léon and Stephen C. Levinson: 562-569 *De Léon, Lourdes. 1992. Body Parts and Location in Tzotzil: Ongoing Grammaticalization. In Lourdes de Léon and Stephen C. Levinson. 570–589. *Haviland, John B. 1992. Seated and Settled: Tzotzil Verbs of the Body. In Lourdes de Léon and Stephen C. Levinson. 543–561. *Lehmann, Christian. 1992. Yukatekische lokale Relatoren in typologischer Perspektive. In Lourdes de Léon and Stephen C. Levinson. 626–641. *Goldap, Christel. 1992. Morphology and semantics of Yucatec Space Relators. In Lourdes de Léon and Stephen C. Levinson. 612-625 *Sherzer Joel. 1976. Areal Linguistics in North America 64 Native Languages of America vol 1 Sebeok, T, ed * Suaréz, Jorge A. 1983. The Mesoamerican Indian Languages (Cambridge Language Surveys), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press *Yasugi, Yoshiho. 1995. Native Middle American languages: an areal-typological perspective. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. {{Mesoamerican families * Sprachbund Indigenous languages of Central America Indigenous languages of North America