The Oto-Manguean or Otomanguean ( ) languages are a large family comprising several subfamilies of indigenous languages of the Americas. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the family, which is now extinct, was spoken as far south as Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Oto-Manguean is widely viewed as a proven language family.
The highest number of speakers of Oto-Manguean languages today is in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where the two largest branches, the Zapotecan and the Mixtecan languages, are spoken by almost 1.5 million people combined. In central Mexico, particularly in the states of Mexico, Hidalgo, and Querétaro, the languages of the Oto-Pamean branch are spoken: the Otomi and the closely-related Mazahua have over 500,000 speakers combined. In the linguistic world of Mesoamerica, the Otomanguean family stands out as the most diverse and extensively distributed.
Some Oto-Manguean languages are moribund or highly endangered; for example, both Ixcatec and Matlatzinca have fewer than 250 speakers, most of whom are elderly. Other languages, particularly of the Manguean branch, which was spoken outside Mexico, have become extinct; they included the Chiapanec language, which was declared extinct after 1990. Others, such as Subtiaba, which was most closely related to Me'phaa (Tlapanec), have been extinct longer and are known only from early-20th-century descriptions.
The Oto-Manguean language family is the most diverse and most geographically-widespread language family that is represented in Mesoamerica. The internal diversity is comparable with that of Indo-European, and the Proto-Oto-Manguean language is estimated to have been spoken sometime before 2000 BCE.Kaufman & Justeson 2009:227 That means that at least for the past 4,000 years, Oto-Manguean languages have co-existed with the other languages of Mesoamerica and have developed so many traits in common with them that they are now seen as part of a Sprachbund, called the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area.
However, Oto-Manguean also stands out from the other language families of Mesoamerica in several features. It is the only language family in North America, Mesoamerica, and Central America whose members are all tonal languages. It also stands out by having a much more analytic structure than other Mesoamerican languages. Another typical trait of Oto-Manguean is that its members almost all show VSO (verb–subject–object) basic order of clausal constituents.
Overview
Genealogical classification of Oto-Manguean languages Family Groups Languages Where spoken and approximate number of speakers Oto-Manguean languages Western Oto-Mangue Oto-Pame–Chinantecan Oto-Pamean Otomi (Hñähñu) (several varieties) Central Mexico (c. 212,000) Mazahua (Hñatho) Mexico (state) (c. 150,000) Matlatzincan Mexico (state). Two varieties: Ocuiltec–Tlahuica (c. 450) and Matlatzinca de San Francisco (c. 1,200) Pame San Luis Potosí. Three varieties: Southern Pame (no speakers), Central Pame (c. 5,000), Northern Pame (c. 5,000). Chichimeca Jonaz Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí (c. 1,500) Chinantecan Chinantec (around 10 variants) northern Oaxaca and southern Veracruz, (c. 224,000) Tlapanec–MangueTlapanecan Tlapanec (Me'phaa) Guerrero (c. 75,000) Subtiaba (†) Nicaragua Manguean Chiapanec (†) Chiapas Mangue (†) Nicaragua Eastern Oto-Mangue Popolocan–Zapotecan Popolocan Mazatec north-eastern Oaxaca and Veracruz (c. 206,000) Ixcatec northern Oaxaca (2) Chocho northern Oaxaca (< 850) Popoloca Southern Puebla, (c. 17,000) Zapotecan Zapotec (around 50 variants) Central and eastern Oaxaca (c. 490,000) Chatino (around 5 variants) Oaxaca (c. 23,000) Amuzgo–MixtecanEvidence for this grouping has never been published. AmuzgoanAmuzgo (around 4 variants) Oaxaca and Guerrero (c. 44,000) Mixtecan Mixtec (around 30 variants) central, southern and western Oaxaca; southern Puebla and eastern Guerrero (c. 511,000) Cuicatec Cuicatlán, Oaxaca, (c. 13,000) Trique (also called Triqui) western Oaxaca (c. 30,000)
History of classification Internal classification and reconstruction A genetic relationship between Zapotecan and Mixtecan was first proposed by Manuel Orozco y Berra in 1864; he also included Cuicatec, Chocho, and Amuzgo in his grouping. In 1865, Pimentel added Mazatec, Popoloca, Chatino, and Chinantec and also posed a separate group of Pame, Otomi and Mazahua, the beginning of the Oto-Pamean sub-branch. Daniel Brinton's classification of 1891 added Matlatzinca and Chichimeca Jonaz to Pimentel's Oto-Pamean group, which had not yet become known by that name, and he reclassified some languages of the previously-included languages of the Oaxacan group. In 1920, Walther Lehmann included the Chiapanec–Mangue languages and correctly established the major subgroupings of the Oaxacan group. In 1926, Schmidt coined the name "Otomi–Mangue" for a group consisting of the Oto-Pamean and the Chiapanec–Mangue languages. The Oto-Pamean and the Main Oaxacan groups were not joined into one family until Edward Sapir's classification in 1929, which included them in the Hokan languages.
In the 1950s, reconstructive work began to be done on individual Oto-Manguean language groups. Proto-Oto-Pamean was reconstructed by Doris Bartholomew, Proto-Zapotecan by Morris Swadesh, and Proto-Chiapanec–Mangue by Fernández de Miranda and Roberto Weitlaner. The classification by Campbell (1997) was the first to present a unified view of the Oto-Manguean languages. In 1981, William Merrifield published a reconstruction of the kinship terminologies of each of the Oto-Manguean branches and of Proto-Oto-Manguean. Unpublished reconstructions of Proto-Oto-Manguean grammar have also been made by Terrence Kaufman.Kaufman & Justeson 2009. (Kaufman, Terrence, 1983 New Perspectives on Comparative Otomanguean Phonology. Excerpts presented at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, 1983. Complete manuscript on file, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh. 1988 Otomangean Tense/Aspect/Mood, Voice, and Nominalization Markers. Manuscript on file, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh.)
In spite of the lack of a full published reconstruction of Proto-Oto-Manguean, the language family has now been widely accepted by specialists, including Lyle Campbell, Terrence Kaufman, and William Poser. Campbell and Poser, writing in 2008, concluded, "Tlapanec-Subtiaba proved not to belong to 'Hokan' as postulated by Sapir (1925a), but to be a branch of Otomanguean...." Nonetheless, a few studies have retained the inclusion in Hokan, particularly Joseph Greenberg's widely-rejected 1987 classification,Greenberg 1987 as well as its derivative works by Merritt Ruhlen.Greenberg & Ruhlen 2008 Writing in 1988, Leonardo Manrique still listed Tlapanec-Mangue as an isolated family.Marlett, Stephen. 2013. "Bibliografia del Me'phaa", SIL
The status of the Amuzgo language as part of the Mixtecan group or as forming its own branch from the Proto-Oto-Manguean node has been discussed by Longacre, who argued for the latter,Longacre 1966 but the most currently-accepted classification by Lyle Campbell (1997) follows Kaufman in considering Amuzgo to be a branch of Mixtecan. Swadesh (1960) and Rensch included the Huave language as a separate branch within Oto-Manguean, but the inclusion has proved to be untenable, as most of the cognates were loanwords from Zapotec. Huave is now considered a language isolate.Campbell 1997:161
Longacre (1968) considered Oto-Manguean to be among the most extensively-studied language families of the world, with a level of reconstruction rivaling the Indo-European family in completeness, but Kaufman and Justeson (2009) reject that and lament the rudimentary reconstruction of Proto-Oto-Manguean lexicon (only c. 350 items have been reconstructed) and grammar. They call for a redoubling of the effort to document and reconstruct several important branches that have received little attention: principally Mixtecan, Popolocan, and Oto-Pamean.
Brown (2015) evaluated the evidence that has been assembled in support of Oto-Manguean. He points out that vocabulary reconstructed for Proto-Oto-Manguean is not supported by regular sound correspondences. While scholars, including Swadesh, Rensch, and Kaufman, have all reconstructed Proto-Oto-Manguean words, none has done so with the benefit of detailed sound correspondences, which makes Brown argue that their reconstructions, as well as Oto-Manguean itself, are called into question. Nevertheless, he suggests that Oto-Manguean as a Sprachbund (language diffusion area) is a reasonable alternative hypothesis to the proposal of Oto-Manguean as a language family.
Inclusion in macro-family hypotheses Some early classifications, such as that by Brinton, considered that Oto-Manguean languages might be related to Chinese because its languages, like Chinese, were tonal and mostly monosyllabic. That idea was quickly abandoned as it was discovered that tonal languages are common, and advances in the historical study of Chinese were made, including the discovery that Old Chinese was non-tonal.Campbell 1997:157
Edward Sapir included Subtiaba–Tlapanec in his Hokan phylum but did not classify the other Oto-Manguean languages in his famous 1929 classification. In his 1960 classification, Joseph Greenberg considered Oto-Manguean so aberrant from other Native American languages that it was the only accepted family (aside from the Purépecha isolate), which he made a primary branch of his Amerind family. However, in his 1987 revision, Greenberg linked it with Aztec-Tanoan in a "Central Amerind" branch, apart from Tlapanec, which, although it had been unequivocally linked to Oto-Manguean, he continued to classify as Hokan.Campbell 1997:211
No hypothesis including Oto-Manguean in any higher-level unit has been able to withstand scrutiny.
Prehistory The Oto-Manguean family has existed in southern Mexico at least since 2000 BCE and probably several thousand years earlier,Kaufman & Justeson 2009 and some estimates using the controversial method of glottochronology suggest an approximate splitting date of Proto-Otomanguean at c. 4400 BCE.Campbell (1997, p. 159) That makes the Oto-Manguean family the language family of the Americas with the deepest time depth, as well as the oldest language family with evidence of tonal contrast in the proto-language.
The Oto-Manguean Urheimat has been thought to be in the Tehuacán Valley in connection with one of the earliest neolithic cultures of Mesoamerica, and although it is now unsure whether Tehuacán was the original home of the Proto-Otomanguean people, it is agreed that the Tehuacán culture (5000 BCE–2300 BCE) was likely made up of Oto-Mangue speakers.
The long history of the Oto-Manguean family has resulted in considerable linguistic diversity between the branches of the family. Terrence Kaufman compares the diversity between the main branches of Oto-Manguean with that between the main branches of Indo-European. Kaufman also proposes that Oto-Manguean languages are an important candidate for being the source of many of the traits that have diffused into the other languages in the Mesoamerican linguistic area.
Oto-Mangue-speakers have been among the earliest to form highly complex cultures of Mesoamerica. The archeological site of Monte Albán, with remains dated as early as 1000 BCE, is believed to have been in continuous use by Zapotecs. The undeciphered Zapotec script is one of the earliest forms of Mesoamerican writing.