Totonacan languages

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The Totonacan Languages are a family of closely-related languages spoken by approximately 200,000 speakers in the states of Veracruz, Puebla, and Hidalgo in Mexico. The Totonacan languages are not demonstrably related to any other languages, although they show numerous areal features with other languages of the Mesoamerican sprachbund such as the Mayan languages and Nahuatl.

Contents

0.1 Language Status

1 Phonology of Totonacan languages

1.1 Consonants
1.2 Vowels

2 Totonacan grammatical traits

2.0.1 The Comitative Construction
2.0.2 Body-Part Incorporation

3 References

Language Status

Although the family is traditionally divided into two languages, Totonac and Tepehua, the various dialects thereof are not mutually intelligible and thus Totonac and Tepehua are better characterized as families in themselves. The following preliminary classification appears to be generally accepted:

Totonac
*Papantla Totonac
*North-Central Totonac
*South-Central Totonac
*Misantla Totonac

Tepehua
*Tlachichilco Tepehua
*Huehuetla Tepehua
*Pisa Flores Tepehua

This classification will likely evolve as more reconstructive work is done on the family.

Like many indigenous languages of Mexico, these languages are slowly giving way to Spanish. Of them, however, only Misantla Totonac is in immediate danger of extinction; the rest appear to be spoken in viable language communities.

Phonology of Totonacan languages

There is some variation between the phoneme inventories of the different dialects of Totonac and Tepehua, but the following phonome inventory which is recnstructed as proto-totonacan by Arana (1953) can be considered a prototypical totonacan inventory.

Consonants

Table of Totonacan consonants

	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stops
Fricatives						h
Affricates
Approximants
Nasals
liquids		ɬ

Vowels

Table of Totonacan vowels

	front		central		back
	glottalized	plain	glottalized	plain	glottalized	plain
high
low

Totonacan grammatical traits

Like many American Indian languages, the Totonacan languages are highly agglutinative and polysynthetic. Furthermore, they exhibit many features of the Mesoamerican areal type, such as a preference for verb-initial order, head-marking, and extensive use of body part roots in metaphorical and locative constructions.

Two features distinctive of Totonacan are worth mentioning in further detail: first, the comitative construction, and secondly body-part incorporation. The examples that follow are taken from Misantla Totonac, but illustrate processes found in all the Totonacan languages.

The Comitative Construction

One typologically unusual feature of Totonacan morphology is the fact that a verb may be inflected for more than one subject. For example, a verb "run" may be inflected with both 1st person and 2nd person subject affixes simultaneously to give a sentence meaning "You and I run", "You run with me", or "I run with you".

Iklaatsaa'layaa'n.
Ik-laa-tsaa'la-yaa-'-na
1s-COM-run-imperf-2s-COM
"You and I run".

Body-Part Incorporation

The Totonacan languages exhibit noun incorporation, but only special prefixing combing forms of body-part roots may be incorporated. When these roots are incorporated, they serve to delimit the verb's the locus of affect -- that is, they indicate which part of the subject or object is affected by the action.

Ikintsuu'ksaan.
Ik-kin-tsuu'ks-yaa-na
1s-nose-kiss-imperf-2o
"I kiss your nose. (Lit: "I nose-kiss you.")

Tuuxqatka'n.
tuu-xqat-kan-'
foot-wash-REFL-2s
"You wash your foot/feet" (Lit: "You foot-wash yourself".)

A body-part root acting as a non-agentive subject may also be incorporated.

Ikaa'ka'tsan.
Ik-kaa'k-ka'tsan
1s-head-hurt
"My head hurts." (Lit: "I head-hurt".)

It is worthwhile to note that Totonacan noun incorporation never decreases the valency of the verb, making Totonacan very typologically unusual. The lack of valency-reducing noun incorporation, which is the cross-linguistically the most common type, may well be due to the very tight semantic restrictions on incorporable nouns.

References

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