Piman (or Tepiman) refers to a group of languages within the

Uto-Aztecan 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 ...

family that are spoken by ethnic groups (including the Pima) spanning from Arizona in the north to

Durango Durango, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Durango, is one of the 31 states which make up the Political divisions of Mexico, 32 Federal Entities of Mexico, situated in the northwest portion of the country. With a population of 1,832,650 ...

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 ...

in the south. The Piman languages are as follows (Campbell 1997): : 1. O'odham (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 ''(†)'' Linguistic evidence suggests that the various Piman languages split about a thousand years ago.

Morphology

Piman languages are

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes (word parts), each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglu ...

, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several

morpheme A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...

s strung together.

References

Agglutinative languages Languages of the United States Indigenous languages of the Southwestern United States Indigenous languages of the North American Southwest {{UtoAztecan-lang-stub