The Tepecano language is an extinct indigenous language of Mexico belonging to the Uto-Aztecan language-family. It was formerly spoken by a small group of people in Azqueltán (earlier Atzqueltlán), Jalisco, a small village on the Río Bolaños in the far northern part of the state, just east of the territory of the

Huichol people The Huichol or Wixárika are an indigenous people of Mexico and the United States living in the Sierra Madre Occidental range in the states of Nayarit, Jalisco, Zacatecas, and Durango, as well as in the United States in the states of California, ...

. Most closely related to Southern Tepehuán of the state of Durango, Tepecano was a Mesoamerican language and evinced many of the traits that define the

Mesoamerican Linguistic Area The Mesoamerican language area is a ''sprachbund'' containing many of the languages natively spoken in the cultural area of Mesoamerica. This sprachbund is defined by an array of syntactic, lexical and phonological traits as well as a number of ethn ...

. So far as is known, the last speaker of Tepecano was Lino de la Rosa (born September 22, 1895), who was still living as of February 1980. ChichimecNations

Research on Tepecano was first carried out by the American linguistic anthropologist

John Alden Mason John Alden Mason (January 14, 1885 – November 7, 1967) was an American archaeological anthropologist and linguist. Mason was born in Orland, Indiana, but grew up in Philadelphia's Germantown. He received his undergraduate degree from the Unive ...

in Azqueltán from 1911 to 1913. This work led to the publication of a monographic grammatical sketch in 1916 as well as an article on native prayers in Tepecano that Mason had collected from informants in 1918. Later field-research was conducted by American linguist Dennis Holt in 1965 and from 1979 to 80, but none of his results have so far been published.Dennis Holt, personal communication

Morphology

Tepecano is an

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 ...

language, 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.

Notes

Bibliography

* * * * {{Uto-Aztecan languages Agglutinative languages Piman languages Mesoamerican languages Extinct languages of North America Indigenous languages of Mexico Languages extinct in the 20th century 20th-century disestablishments in North America