Endangered Language Alliance
Amuzgo is a member of the Oto-Manguean language family, a highly diverse group of languages spoken by several million people across southern Mexico and formerly in parts of Central America. Many Oto-Manguean languages have disappeared or are spoken today only by very small numbers of people. Amuzgo’s place in the language family’s Eastern Oto-Manguean branch is uncertain, but it clearly shares many similarities through inheritance or contact with the Mixtecan languages, another focus of ELA research.
…en el hospital básico de Xochistlahuaca hace falta una traductora de lengua indígena para atender bien a los indígenas, “porque sucede muchas veces que, como el médico no les entiende bien cuál es el padecimiento, les da otra medicina que termina por enfermar más a las pacientes”. (Contralinea 18, Dec. 1 2008)
Efforts at the promotion of indigenous rights are often met with brutality and the radio station survives only by virtue of the bravery of its staff and supporters (see video below). In one of the poorest and most dangerous regions in Mexico, the Amuzgo people struggle to maintain their livelihood, culture and language without institutional support.
The phonology of Amuzgo has been its most discussed aspect. Bauernschmidt’s (1965) paper introduced the notion of the “ballistic” syllable by way of a general description of Amuzgo syllable structure. The uniqueness of the ballistic/controlled distinction has been disputed in more recent works (Hererra 2000) but its relatedness to more familiar phenomena such as breathy voice remains an open question. Recent work has also tackled the complex tone system and its interaction with the phonation distinction (Smith-Stark & Garcia 1984, Williams 2005, Kim 2011).
Selected Bibliography
Bauernschmidt, Amy. 1965. Amuzgo syllable dynamics. Language 41. 471-83.
Belmar, Francisco. 1901. Investigación sobre el idioma amuzgo, que se habla en algunos pueblos del distrito de Jamiltepec; se toma para dichas investigaciones el idioma que se habla en el pueblo de Ipalapa. Lenguas del Estado de Oaxaca, Oaxaca.
Buck, Marjorie J. 2000. Gramática amuzga de San Pedro Amuzgos, Oaxaca. In C. Stewart & R. Stewart, Diccionario amuzgo de San Pedro Amuzgos, Oaxaca, Coyoacán, pp. 361-480. D.F.: ILV.
Cuevas Suárez, Susana. 1985. Fonología generativa del amuzgo. Colección Científica 141, Serie Linguistica. México, D.F.: INAH.
De Jesús García, Moisés Zeferino. 2004. La morfología verbal del amuzgo de Xochistlahuaca, Guerrero. Masters Thesis. Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, México.
Hart, Helen Long. 1957. Hierarchical structuring of Amuzgo grammar. IJAL 23:3.141-64.
Herrera Z., Esther. 2000. Amuzgo and Zapotec: Two more cases of laryngeally complex languages. Anthropological Linguistics 42:4, pp. 545-563.
Kim, Yuni. 2011. Algunas evidencias sobre representaciones tonales en amuzgo de
San Pedro Amuzgos. Proceedings of CILLA V.
Longacre, Robert E. 1966. The linguistic affinities of Amuzgo. En Pompa y Pompa, editor, Summa antropologica en homenaje a Roberto J. Weitlaner, pp. 541-60. México, D.F.: INAH.
Longacre, Robert E. and René Millon. 1966. Proto-Mixtecan and Proto-Amuzgo- Mixtecan vocabularies; a preliminary cultural analysis. Anthropological Linguistics 3:4.1-44.
Rensch, Calvin R. 1976. Phonological developments in Amuzgo. In Comparative Otomanguean Phonology, pp. 117-26. Language Science Monograph 14. Bloominton, Indiana: Indiana University Publications.
Smith Stark, Thomas C. and Fermín Tapia García. 1984. Los tonos del amuzgo de San Pedro Amuzgos, Anales de Antropología 21, pp. 199-220. Fonética y Fonología y Tipología.
Smith Stark, Thomas C. and Fermín Tapia García. 2002. El amuzgo como lengua activa. In II Volumen de Investigaciones lingüísticas en Mesoamérica. Paulette Levy (ed.), pp. 81-129. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México.
Tapia García, L. Fermín. 1999. Tzon ‘tzikindyi jño ndá Tzjón Noa yo jño tzko. Diccionario amuzgo-español. El amuzgo de San Pedro Amuzgos, Oaxaca. México: CIESAS, Plaza y Valdés.
Williams, Cindy. 2005. An analysis of Amuzgo nominal tone. In Rosemary Beam de Azcona and Mary Paster (eds.), pp. 147-161. Survey of California and other Indian languages 13.
Work in progress includes a topological survey, a preliminary version of which is can be seen below, as well as analysis of the agreement system, first described for the San Pedro dialect by Smith-Stark & Garcia (1986/2002). As with all of our other projects, text collection is a continuing priority and some results can be seen in the above videos.
The recordings below demonstrate Amuzgo tones: