The Pame languages are a group of languages in

Mexico Mexico (Spanish language, Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a List of sovereign states, country in the southern portion of North America. It is borders of Mexico, bordered to the north by the United States; to the so ...

that is spoken by around 12,000 Pame people in the state of

San Luis Potosí San Luis Potosí (), officially the Free and Sovereign State of San Luis Potosí ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de San Luis Potosí), is one of the 32 states which compose the Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 58 municipalities and i ...

. It belongs to the Oto-Pamean branch of the Oto-Manguean language family.

Distribution and languages

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensi ...

notes two living varieties of Pame both spoken in the state of San Luis Potosí: Central Pame, in the town of Santa María Acapulco, and Northern Pame, in communities from the north of Río Verde to the border with

Tamaulipas Tamaulipas (), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Tamaulipas ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Tamaulipas), is a state in the northeast region of Mexico; one of the 31 states which, along with Mexico City, comprise the 32 Federal Entiti ...

. The third variety, Southern Pame, was last described in the mid 20th century, is assumed to be extinct, and is very sparsely documented. It was spoken in Jiliapan, Hidalgo, and Pacula, Querétaro. *Northern Pame (Ñãʔũ) (~6,000) *Central Pame (Šiʔúi) (~6,000) *Southern Pame (Šiyúi) (†)

Classification

The Pame languages are part of the Oto-Pamean branch of the Oto-Manguean language family. They are most closely related to the

Chichimeca Jonaz language Chichimeca or Chichimeca Jonaz is an indigenous language of Mexico spoken by around 200 Chichimeca Jonaz people in Misión de Chichimecas near San Luis de la Paz in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. The Chichimeca Jonaz language belongs to t ...

, spoken in Guanajuato, and together, they form the Pamean language groups. During the colonial period, two grammatical descriptions were written.

Phonology

Consonants

Berthiaume (2004) report a complex phonology for Northern Pame with contrasts between plain, voiced, aspirated, and glottalized consonants both for the stops, nasals, affricates and approximants. Pame languages are tonal but the exact number of tonal contrasts is a matter of debate. Avelino, Gibson and Manrique have analyzed the language as having three tones: high and low level tones and a falling

contour tone A tone contour, or contour tone, is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, K ...

(Suárez 1983, pg. 51). However, Berthiaume (2004) argues that only a high and a rising tone exist, no low, level tone.

Vowels

Grammar

Pame grammar is characterized by complex morphophonemics and suppletion. Many grammatical categories are marked by exchanging consonants in patterns that are not fully predictable. The morphology is head-marking, marking agreement with possessors on nouns and with the participants in actions on verbs. Its personal system distinguishes between singular, dual and plural number in all persons, and there is also an exclusive first-person category ("we but not you"). Pame has an

octal The octal numeral system, or oct for short, is the radix, base-8 number system, and uses the Numerical digit, digits 0 to 7. This is to say that 10octal represents eight and 100octal represents sixty-four. However, English, like most languages, ...

(base-8) counting system, as the Pame keep counting their knuckles, rather than the fingers.

Examples

The following table shows the numbers and some basic words in different varieties of Pame:Soustelle, 1937, p. 364-365

Media

Pame-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio station

XEANT-AM XEANT-AM (''La Voz de las Huastecas'' – "The Voice of the Huastecas") is an indigenous community radio station that broadcasts in Spanish, Nahuatl, Pame and Huastec (Tének) from Tancanhuitz de Santos in the Mexican state of San Luis Potos� ...

, based in Tancanhuitz de Santos,

References

Bibliography

*Suaréz, Jorge A. 1983. The Mesoamerican Indian Languages. Cambridge: CUP *Berthiaume, S. C. (2004). A phonological grammar of Northern Pame (Doctoral dissertation, PhD thesis, University of Texas at Arlington). *Avelino, H. (2006)
The typology of Pame number systems and the limits of Mesoamerica as a linguistic area
Linguistic Typology, 9, 493–513. *Gibson, L. F. (1956). Pame (Otomi) phonemics and morphophonemics. International Journal of American Linguistics, 22(4), 242–265. *Gibson, Lorna, and Doris Bartholomew. "Pame noun inflection." International Journal of American Linguistics 45, no. 4 (1979): 309–322. *Manrique Castañeda, Leonardo. "Análisis preliminar del vocabulario pame de Fray Juan Guadalupe Soriano." In Anales de Antropología, vol. 12, no. 1. 2009. *Castañeda, L. M. (1960). Dos gramáticas pames del siglo XVIII. Anales del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, sexta época (1945-1967), 11, 283–287. *Lastra, Y. (2015). Tratado del arte y unión de los idiomas otomí y pame; Vocabularios de los idiomas pame, otomi, mexicano y jonaz de Fray Juan Guadalupe Soriano. *Manrique Castañeda, Leonardo. 1967. Jiliapan Pame. The Handbook of Middle American Indians, ed. by Robert Wauchope, general editor, Norman McQuown, volume editor, vol. 5, 331–48. Austin: University of Texas Press. * Soustelle, Jacques 937(1992): ''La familia Otomí-Pame de México Central'', Fondo de Cultura Económica, México DF, .

External links

* ''A Phonological Grammar of Northern Pame'

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pame Language Indigenous languages of Mexico Oto-Manguean languages Oto-Pamean languages Endangered Oto-Manguean languages