Piman (or Tepiman) refers to a group of languages within the
Uto-Aztecan family that are spoken by ethnic groups (including the
Pima) spanning from Arizona in the north to
Durango,
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 ...
in the south.
The Piman languages are as follows (Campbell 1997):
: 1.
O'odham
The O'odham peoples, including the Tohono O'odham, the Pima or Akimel O'odham, and the Hia C-ed O'odham, are indigenous Uto-Aztecan peoples of the Sonoran desert in southern and central Arizona and northern Sonora, united by a common herita ...
(also known as Pima language, Papago language)
: 2.
O'ob (also known as Mountain Pima, Lowland Pima)
: 3.
O'otham (also known as Tepehuán proper, Southwestern Tepehuán, Southeastern Tepehuán)
: 4.
Tepecano ''(†)''
Morphology
Piman languages are
agglutinative
In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...
, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several
morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone are ...
s strung together.
Sources
Agglutinative languages
Languages of the United States
Indigenous languages of the Southwestern United States
Indigenous languages of the North American Southwest
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