Cuitlatec, or Cuitlateco, is an extinct language of

Mexico Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a country in North America. It is the northernmost country in Latin America, and borders the United States to the north, and Guatemala and Belize to the southeast; while having maritime boundar ...

, formerly spoken by an

indigenous people There is no generally accepted definition of Indigenous peoples, although in the 21st century the focus has been on self-identification, cultural difference from other groups in a state, a special relationship with their traditional territ ...

known as Cuitlatec.

Classification

Cuitlatec has not been convincingly classified as belonging to any

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term ''family'' is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics ...

. It is believed to be a language isolate. In their controversial classification of the

indigenous languages of the Americas The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples. Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while many more are now e ...

, Greenberg and Ruhlen include Cuitlatec in an expanded

Chibchan The Chibchan languages (also known as Chibchano) make up a language family indigenous to the Isthmo-Colombian Area, which extends from eastern Honduras to northern Colombia and includes populations of these countries as well as Nicaragua, Costa ...

language family ( Macro-Chibchan), along with a variety of other Mesoamerican and South American languages. Escalante Hernández suggests a possible relation to the

Uto-Aztecan languages The Uto-Aztecan languages are a family of native American languages, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The name of the language family reflects the common ...

Geographic distribution

Cuitlatec was spoken in the

state State most commonly refers to: * State (polity), a centralized political organization that regulates law and society within a territory **Sovereign state, a sovereign polity in international law, commonly referred to as a country **Nation state, a ...

Guerrero Guerrero, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Guerrero, is one of the 32 states that compose the administrative divisions of Mexico, 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into Municipalities of Guerrero, 85 municipalities. The stat ...

. By the 1930s, Cuitlatec was spoken only in San Miguel Totolapan. The last speaker of the language, Juana Can, is believed to have died in the 1960s. In 1979, only two elderly women, Florentina Celso and Apolonia Robles, were able to remember about fifty words of the language.

Phonology

Consonants

*The sounds , , , and are found in

loan word A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing (linguistics), borrowing. Borrowing ...

s from

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas **Spanish cuisine **Spanish history **Spanish culture ...

Vowels

Grammar

Sentences generally follow SVO word order.

Adjective An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...

s precede the nouns they modify.

References

Bibliography

* Susana Drucker, Roberto Escalante, & Roberto J. Weitlaner. 1969. The Cuitlatec. In Evon Z. Vogt, ed., ''Handbook of Middle American Indians, Ethnology'': Vol 7, Chapter 30.

University of Texas Press The University of Texas Press (or UT Press) is the university press of the University of Texas at Austin. Established in 1950, the Press publishes scholarly and trade books in several areas, including Latin American studies, Caribbean, Caribbea ...

, Austin: 565–575 * McQuown, Norman A. 1945. Fonémica del Cuitlateco. ''El México Antiguo'' 5: 239–254. * Weitlaner, Roberto J. 1939. Notes on the Cuitlatec language. ''El México Antiguo'' 4: 363–373.

External links

Cuitlatec word list on Wiktionary
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cuitlatec Language Mesoamerican languages Extinct languages of North America Indigenous languages of Mexico Subject–object–verb languages Languages extinct in the 1960s Guerrero