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. Most languages are known to belong to language families (families hereforth). ... Veracruz is the name of both a state in Mexico and that states largest city. ... The Mexican state of Puebla is located in the center of the country, to the east of Mexico City. ... This article is about the Mexican state. ... An areal feature, in linguistics, is the appearance of a given feature of typology in several unrelated languages due to the influence of geographical closeness. ... Mesoamerica is the region extending from central Mexico south to the northwestern border of Costa Rica that gave rise to a group of stratified, culturally related agrarian civilizations spanning an approximately 3,000-year period before the European discovery of the New World by Columbus. ... A Sprachbund (German for language union) (also known as linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area) is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity. ... Jump to: navigation, search The Mayan languages are a family of related languages spoken from southeastern Mexico through northern Central America as far south as Honduras. ... Nahuatl is a native language of central Mexico. ...

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: A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος) is a variant, or variety, of a language spoken in a certain geographical area. ... A pair of languages is said to be mutually intelligible if speakers of one language can readily understand the other language. ...

• 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. Native American languages are the indigenous languages of the Americas, spoken from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America. ...

Grammar

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. An agglutinative language is a language in which the words are formed by joining morphemes together. ... Polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i. ...

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". Morphology is the following: In linguistics, morphology is the study of the structure of word forms. ...

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.