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107-437: McQuown (1942, 1956) defined Macro-Mayan as the hypothetical ancestor of Mayan, Mije-Sokean, and Totonacan, further promoting the hypothesis. However, his hypothesis relied on the presence of "a glottalized series" of consonants in both Mayan and Totonakan. Such a trait could have potentially spread through contact. McQuown also admitted that “the relatively small number of coincidences in vocabulary indicates to us that this kinship

214-518: A diaeresis was sometimes used to indicate the start of a new syllable within a sequence of letters that could otherwise be misinterpreted as being a single vowel (e.g., "coöperative", "reëlect"), but modern writing styles either omit such marks or use a hyphen to indicate a syllable break (e.g. "co-operative", "re-elect"). Some modified letters, such as the symbols ⟨ å ⟩ , ⟨ ä ⟩ , and ⟨ ö ⟩ , may be regarded as new individual letters in themselves, and assigned

321-638: A lingua franca , but Latin was widely spoken in the western half, and as the western Romance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet. With the spread of Western Christianity during the Middle Ages , the Latin alphabet was gradually adopted by the peoples of Northern Europe who spoke Celtic languages (displacing the Ogham alphabet) or Germanic languages (displacing earlier Runic alphabets ) or Baltic languages , as well as by

428-475: A ⟩ , ⟨ e ⟩ , ⟨ i ⟩ , ⟨ o ⟩ , ⟨ u ⟩ . The languages that use the Latin script today generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns . The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English , for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized; whereas Modern English of

535-496: A European CEN standard. In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in languages that were already written with the Roman characters. To represent these new sounds, extensions were therefore created, be it by adding diacritics to existing letters , by joining multiple letters together to make ligatures , by creating completely new forms, or by assigning

642-525: A concerted effort as recorded in El Salvador in 1932. Indigenous languages have been seen by the governing classes as a hindrance to building homogeneous nation states and as an impediment to social progress. These viewpoints sparked a renewed interest in the hispanization of indigenous communities and the introduction of compulsory education in Spanish resulted in a great decline of indigenous languages throughout

749-638: A handful of undocumented languages along the Costa Grande . The linguistic history of Mesoamerican languages can roughly be divided into pre-Columbian , colonial and modern periods. The first human presence in Mesoamerica is documented around 8000 BCE, during a period referred to as the Paleo-Indian . Linguistic data, however, including language reconstruction derived from the comparative method , do not reach further back than approximately 5000 years (towards

856-588: A par with Spanish. At present the linguistic situation of Mesoamerican languages is most difficult in the Central American countries like Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua where indigenous languages still do not enjoy the rights or privileges now granted them elsewhere, and are still subject to social stigmatization. [1] Mesoamerica is one of the relatively few places in the world where writing has developed independently throughout history. The Mesoamerican scripts deciphered to date are logosyllabic combining

963-674: A proposal endorsed by the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People to switch the Crimean Tatar language to Latin by 2025. In July 2020, 2.6 billion people (36% of the world population) use the Latin alphabet. By the 1960s, it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated

1070-542: A sequence are similar enough in speech to understand each other fairly well, but those separated more widely have trouble understanding each other, and there are no clear breaks naturally separating the continuum into coherent sub-regions. All of these factors together have made it exceedingly difficult to distinguish between what constitutes a language or a dialect in Mesoamerica. Linguistic isoglosses do not coincide often or strongly enough to prove very useful when trying to decide, and sociological factors often further cloud

1177-403: A single language. For example, in Spanish, the character ⟨ ñ ⟩ is considered a letter, and sorted between ⟨ n ⟩ and ⟨ o ⟩ in dictionaries, but the accented vowels ⟨ á ⟩ , ⟨ é ⟩ , ⟨ í ⟩ , ⟨ ó ⟩ , ⟨ ú ⟩ , ⟨ ü ⟩ are not separated from the unaccented vowels ⟨

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1284-502: A single name. Sometimes a single name has even been used to describe completely unrelated linguistic groups, as is the case with the terms " Popoluca " or " Chichimeca ". This shortage of language names has meant that the convention within Mesoamerican linguistics when writing about a specific linguistic variety is to always mention the name of the broad linguistic group as well as the name of the community, or geographic location in which it

1391-523: A small symbol that can appear above or below a letter, or in some other position, such as the umlaut sign used in the German characters ⟨ ä ⟩ , ⟨ ö ⟩ , ⟨ ü ⟩ or the Romanian characters ă , â , î , ș , ț . Its main function is to change the phonetic value of the letter to which it is added, but it may also modify the pronunciation of a whole syllable or word, indicate

1498-466: A special function to pairs or triplets of letters. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining an alphabetical order or collation sequence, which can vary with the particular language. Some examples of new letters to the standard Latin alphabet are the Runic letters wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ and thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩ , and the letter eth ⟨Ð/ð⟩ , which were added to

1605-499: A specific place in the alphabet for collation purposes, separate from that of the letter on which they are based, as is done in Swedish . In other cases, such as with ⟨ ä ⟩ , ⟨ ö ⟩ , ⟨ ü ⟩ in German, this is not done; letter-diacritic combinations being identified with their base letter. The same applies to digraphs and trigraphs. Different diacritics may be treated differently in collation within

1712-511: A theory of either or both of these cultures having a prominent role as a dominating power in early Mesoamerican history. (Other branches are outside Mesoamerica.) (other branches are outside Mesoamerica) Latin script The Latin script , also known as the Roman script , is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet , derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which

1819-610: A unified writing system for the Inuit languages in the country. The writing system is based on the Latin alphabet and is modeled after the one used in the Greenlandic language . On 12 February 2021 the government of Uzbekistan announced it will finalize the transition from Cyrillic to Latin for the Uzbek language by 2023. Plans to switch to Latin originally began in 1993 but subsequently stalled and Cyrillic remained in widespread use. At present

1926-465: A unifying factor between them. The relative endogamy of the town community has also resulted in a large linguistic diversification between communities despite geographical and linguistic proximity, often resulting in a low intelligibility between varieties of the same language spoken in adjacent communities. The exception to this rule is when a common “ lingua franca ” has evolved to facilitate communication between different linguistic groups. This has been

2033-739: Is Oaxaca , which is dominated by speakers of Oto-Manguean languages , mainly Mixtec and Zapotec , both of which are extremely internally diverse. Non-Oto-Manguean languages include Mixe , Tequistlatecan , Huave , and the Nahuan Pochutec language . Huave was the original language of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec , but lost territory to Zapotec. Oaxaca is the most linguistically diverse area of Mesoamerica and its 36,820 square miles (95,400 km ) contain at least 100 mutually unintelligible linguistic variants. The subarea commonly called Central Mexico , covering valleys and mountainous areas surrounding

2140-632: Is also used by the Faroese alphabet . Some West, Central and Southern African languages use a few additional letters that have sound values similar to those of their equivalents in the IPA. For example, Adangme uses the letters ⟨Ɛ ɛ⟩ and ⟨Ɔ ɔ⟩ , and Ga uses ⟨Ɛ ɛ⟩ , ⟨Ŋ ŋ⟩ and ⟨Ɔ ɔ⟩ . Hausa uses ⟨Ɓ ɓ⟩ and ⟨Ɗ ɗ⟩ for implosives , and ⟨Ƙ ƙ⟩ for an ejective . Africanists have standardized these into

2247-460: Is called the Roman numeral system, and the collection of the elements is known as the Roman numerals . The numbers 1, 2, 3 ... are Latin/Roman script numbers for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system . The use of the letters I and V for both consonants and vowels proved inconvenient as the Latin alphabet was adapted to Germanic and Romance languages. W originated as a doubled V (VV) used to represent

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2354-476: Is language-dependent, as only the first letter may be capitalized, or all component letters simultaneously (even for words written in title case, where letters after the digraph or trigraph are left in lowercase). A ligature is a fusion of two or more ordinary letters into a new glyph or character. Examples are ⟨ Æ æ⟩ (from ⟨AE⟩ , called ash ), ⟨ Œ œ⟩ (from ⟨OE⟩ , sometimes called oethel or eðel ),

2461-441: Is quite distant” (McQuown 1942:37-38). The hypothesis was not elaborated until 1979 when Brown and Witkowski put forth a proposal with 62 cognate sets and supposed sound correspondences between the two families. They also published two articles proposing a "Mesoamerican Phylum" composed of Macro-Mayan and other language families of Mesoamerica . This proposal was examined closely by Lyle Campbell and Terrence Kaufman who rejected

2568-708: Is spoken, for example Isthmus-Mecayapan Nahuatl , Zoogocho Zapotec or Usila Chinantec . Some language groups however have been more adequately named. This is the case of the Mayan languages, with an internal diversity that is arguably comparable to that found between the Nahuatl dialects , but many of whose linguistic varieties have separate names, such as Kʼicheʼ , Tzotzil or Huastec . Mesoamerica can be divided into smaller linguistic subareas wherein linguistic diffusion has been especially intense, or where certain families have extended to become predominant. One such subarea would be

2675-573: Is unknown. The first complex society in Mesoamerica was the Olmec civilization , which emerged around 2000 BCE during the Early Preclassic . It is documented that around this time many Mesoamerican languages adopted loanwords from the Mixe–Zoquean languages, particularly loanwords related to such culturally fundamental concepts as agriculture and religion . This has led some linguists to believe that

2782-694: Is well established that Mixtec languages were spoken at Tilantongo and Zapotec at Monte Albán (in the Valley of Oaxaca ). The linguistic situation of the Maya area is relatively clear – Proto-Yucatec and Proto-Cholan were established in their respective locations in Yucatán and in the Tabasco area. Around 200 CE speakers of the Tzeltalan branch of Proto-Cholan moved south into Chiapas displacing speakers of Zoquean languages. Throughout

2889-530: The African reference alphabet . Dotted and dotless I — ⟨İ i⟩ and ⟨I ı⟩ — are two forms of the letter I used by the Turkish , Azerbaijani , and Kazakh alphabets. The Azerbaijani language also has ⟨Ə ə⟩ , which represents the near-open front unrounded vowel . A digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to

2996-466: The Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco which was inaugurated in 1536 and which taught both indigenous and classical European languages to both Indians and priests were opened. And missionary grammarians undertook the job of writing grammars for the indigenous languages in order to teach priests. For example, the first grammar of Nahuatl , written by Andrés de Olmos , was published in 1547 – three years before

3103-543: The Crimean Tatar language uses both Cyrillic and Latin. The use of Latin was originally approved by Crimean Tatar representatives after the Soviet Union's collapse but was never implemented by the regional government. After Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 the Latin script was dropped entirely. Nevertheless, Crimean Tatars outside of Crimea continue to use Latin and on 22 October 2021 the government of Ukraine approved

3210-550: The English alphabet . Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 10646 ( Unicode Latin ), have continued to define the 26 × 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages. The DIN standard DIN 91379 specifies a subset of Unicode letters, special characters, and sequences of letters and diacritic signs to allow

3317-656: The Florentine Codex and the songs of the Cantares Mexicanos both written in Classical Nahuatl . The prophetical and historical accounts of the books of Chilam Balam written in the Yucatec Maya language . As well as numerous smaller documents written in other indigenous languages throughout the colonial period. No true literary tradition for Mesoamerican languages of the modern period has yet emerged. Throughout

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3424-574: The Hadiyya and Kambaata languages. On 15 September 1999 the authorities of Tatarstan , Russia, passed a law to make the Latin script a co-official writing system alongside Cyrillic for the Tatar language by 2011. A year later, however, the Russian government overruled the law and banned Latinization on its territory. In 2015, the government of Kazakhstan announced that a Kazakh Latin alphabet would replace

3531-688: The Iranians , Indonesians , Malays , and Turkic peoples . Most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script . Through European colonization the Latin script has spread to the Americas , Oceania , parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, in forms based on the Spanish , Portuguese , English , French , German and Dutch alphabets. It is used for many Austronesian languages , including

3638-591: The Itza ' to move south into the Guatemalan jungle. In northwestern Oaxaca speakers of Mixtec and Chocho - Popolocan languages built successful city-states , such as Teotitlan del Camino , which did not fall under Nahuan subjugation. Speakers of Otomian languages ( Otomi , Mazahua and Matlatzinca ) were routinely displaced to the edges of the Nahuan states. The Otomi of Xaltocan, for example, were forcibly relocated to Otumba by

3745-758: The Kazakh Cyrillic alphabet as the official writing system for the Kazakh language by 2025. There are also talks about switching from the Cyrillic script to Latin in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan , and Mongolia . Mongolia, however, has since opted to revive the Mongolian script instead of switching to Latin. In October 2019, the organization National Representational Organization for Inuit in Canada (ITK) announced that they will introduce

3852-624: The Maya area , roughly covering the Yucatán Peninsula , Guatemala, Belize, Chiapas and Tabasco , where Mayan languages have been highly predominant. The fringes of the area have been home to Xincan (in the southeast) and Mixe-Zoque (along the Pacific coast) speakers, in addition to Nawat (also along the Pacific coast) and the Oto-Manguean Chiapanec language (in the southwest) following postclassic migrations. Another linguistic area

3959-564: The People's Republic of China introduced a script reform to the Zhuang language , changing its orthography from Sawndip , a writing system based on Chinese, to a Latin script alphabet that used a mixture of Latin, Cyrillic, and IPA letters to represent both the phonemes and tones of the Zhuang language, without the use of diacritics. In 1982 this was further standardised to use only Latin script letters. With

4066-626: The Spanish Empire . And in 1770 a decree with the avowed purpose of eliminating the indigenous languages was put forth by the Royal Cedula. This put an end to the teaching of and writing in indigenous languages and began a strict policy of hispanization of the Indians. However the fact that today around five million people in Mesoamerica still speak indigenous languages suggest that this policy wasn't as effective after all. The most important factor towards

4173-461: The Tepiman and Corachol groups) as well as Pame (Oto-Mangue), and other undocumented languages that are now extinct, such as Jalisco Otomi. The Gulf area is traditionally the home of speakers of Totonacan languages in the northern and central area and Mixe–Zoque languages in the southern area. However, the northern gulf area became home to the speakers of Huastec in the preclassic period, and

4280-685: The Turkic -speaking peoples of the former USSR , including Tatars , Bashkirs , Azeri , Kazakh , Kyrgyz and others, had their writing systems replaced by the Latin-based Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s; but, in the 1940s, all were replaced by Cyrillic. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, three of the newly independent Turkic-speaking republics, Azerbaijan , Uzbekistan , Turkmenistan , as well as Romanian-speaking Moldova , officially adopted Latin alphabets for their languages. Kyrgyzstan , Iranian -speaking Tajikistan , and

4387-955: The Valley of Mexico , originally was mainly host to Oto-Pamean languages ; however, beginning in the late classic these languages were largely gradually displaced by Nahuatl , which was henceforth the predominant indigenous language of the area. Otomi , Matlatzinca , and Mazahua retained significant presences. The Western area was inhabited mostly by speakers of Purépecha in Michoacán , Huichol and Cora in Nayarit , and Western Peripheral Nahuatl in Jalisco and Colima . A host of small undocumented languages were spoken in Colima and southern Jalisco, such as Jalisco Otomi and Jalisco Zapotec . The Northern Rim area has been inhabited by semi-nomadic Chichimec speakers of Uto-Aztecan languages (probably related to

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4494-399: The abbreviation ⟨ & ⟩ (from Latin : et , lit.   'and', called ampersand ), and ⟨ ẞ ß ⟩ (from ⟨ſʒ⟩ or ⟨ſs⟩ , the archaic medial form of ⟨s⟩ , followed by an ⟨ ʒ ⟩ or ⟨s⟩ , called sharp S or eszett ). A diacritic, in some cases also called an accent, is

4601-557: The arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, and continuing up until the 19th century, most Mesoamerican languages were written in Latin script . The languages of Mesoamerica belong to 6 major families – Mayan , Oto-Mangue , Mixe–Zoque , Totonacan , Uto-Aztecan and Chibchan languages (only on the southern border of the area) – as well as a few smaller families and isolates – Purépecha , Huave , Tequistlatec , Xincan and Lencan . Among these Oto-Manguean and Mayan families account for

4708-562: The languages indigenous to the Mesoamerican cultural area, which covers southern Mexico, all of Guatemala , Belize , El Salvador , and parts of Honduras , Nicaragua and Costa Rica . The area is characterized by extensive linguistic diversity containing several hundred different languages and seven major language families. Mesoamerica is also an area of high linguistic diffusion in that long-term interaction among speakers of different languages through several millennia has resulted in

4815-686: The languages of the Philippines and the Malaysian and Indonesian languages , replacing earlier Arabic and indigenous Brahmic alphabets. Latin letters served as the basis for the forms of the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah ; however, the sound values are completely different. Under Portuguese missionary influence, a Latin alphabet was devised for the Vietnamese language , which had previously used Chinese characters . The Latin-based alphabet replaced

4922-466: The 16th century. The policies that contributed most to a change in the linguistic situation of Mesoamerica were the policies used for conversion of Indians to Christianity. The first victim of this process was the native writing systems which were banned and prohibited and the existing texts destroyed – the pictorial scripts were seen as an idolatry by the Catholic Church. At first missionaries favoured

5029-649: The 18th century had frequently all nouns capitalized, in the same way that Modern German is written today, e.g. German : Alle Schwestern der alten Stadt hatten die Vögel gesehen , lit.   'All of the Sisters of the old City had seen the Birds';. Words from languages natively written with other scripts , such as Arabic or Chinese , are usually transliterated or transcribed when embedded in Latin-script text or in multilingual international communication,

5136-400: The 19th century. By the 1960s, it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin alphabet in their ( ISO/IEC 646 ) standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. As

5243-414: The 20th century. In a number of indigenous communities it has become practice to learn Spanish first and the indigenous language second. Parents have refrained from teaching their children their own language in order not to subject them to the social stigma of speaking an Indian language – and youths have learned their languages only when they came of age and started taking part in the adult society. Within

5350-679: The 26 × 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages. The Latin alphabet spread, along with Latin , from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire . The eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Turkey, the Levant , and Egypt, continued to use Greek as

5457-643: The Chinese characters in administration in the 19th century with French rule. In the late 19th century, the Romanians switched to using the Latin alphabet, dropping the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet . Romanian is one of the Romance languages . In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 's reforms, the new Republic of Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet for the Turkish language , replacing a modified Arabic alphabet. Most of

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5564-505: The Classic period. Others find Mixe–Zoque an unlikely candidate because no current Mixe–Zoque settlements are found in central Mexico. Around 500–600 CE a new language family entered Mesoamerica when speakers of Proto- Nahuan , a southern Uto-Aztecan language , moved south into central Mexico. Their arrival, which coincides with the decline of Teotihuacan and a period of general turmoil and mass migration in Mesoamerica, has led scientists to speculate that they might have been involved somehow in

5671-434: The Latin alphabet in their ( ISO/IEC 646 ) standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. As the United States held a preeminent position in both industries during the 1960s, the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange , better known as ASCII , which included in the character set the 26 × 2 (uppercase and lowercase) letters of

5778-456: The Law on Official Use of the Language and Alphabet. As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western , Northern , and Central Europe . The Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe mostly used Cyrillic , and the Greek alphabet was in use by Greek speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic script was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like

5885-420: The Maya area. Possible candidates for the language of Teotihuacan have been Nahuatl, Totonac or Mixe–Zoque. Terrence Kaufman has argued that Nahuatl is an unlikely candidate because Proto-Nahuan did not enter Mesoamerica until around the time of the fall of Teotihuacan (c. 600 AD), and that Totonac or Mixe–Zoque are likely candidates because many Mesoamerican languages have borrowed from these two languages during

5992-425: The United States held a preeminent position in both industries during the 1960s, the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange , better known as ASCII , which included in the character set the 26 × 2 (uppercase and lowercase) letters of the English alphabet . Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 10646 ( Unicode Latin ), have continued to define

6099-400: The Valley of Oaxaca, the Oto-Manguean Zapotec culture emerges around c. 1000 BCE. The splitting of Proto-Mayan into the modern Mayan languages slowly began at roughly 2000 BCE when the speakers of Huastec moved north into the Mexican Gulf Coast region . Uto-Aztecan languages were still outside of Mesoamerica during the Preclassic, their speakers living as semi- nomadic hunter-gatherers on

6206-417: The Voiced labial–velar approximant / w / found in Old English as early as the 7th century. It came into common use in the later 11th century, replacing the letter wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ , which had been used for the same sound. In the Romance languages, the minuscule form of V was a rounded u ; from this was derived a rounded capital U for the vowel in the 16th century, while a new, pointed minuscule v

6313-424: The Zapotec of Zaachila . In the late postclassic around 1400 CE Zapotecs of Zaachila moved into the Isthmus of Tehuantepec creating a wedge of Zapotec speaking settlements between the former neighbors the Mixe and the Huave who were pushed into their current territories on the edges of the Isthmus. The Spanish arrival in the new world turned the linguistic situation of Mesoamerica upside down. And from then on

6420-435: The alphabet of Old English . Another Irish letter, the insular g , developed into yogh ⟨Ȝ ȝ⟩ , used in Middle English . Wynn was later replaced with the new letter ⟨w⟩ , eth and thorn with ⟨ th ⟩ , and yogh with ⟨ gh ⟩ . Although the four are no longer part of the English or Irish alphabets, eth and thorn are still used in the modern Icelandic alphabet , while eth

6527-460: The appearance of a ligature ⟨ij⟩ very similar to the letter ⟨ÿ⟩ in handwriting . A trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German ⟨ sch ⟩ , the Breton ⟨ c'h ⟩ or the Milanese ⟨oeu⟩ . In the orthographies of some languages, digraphs and trigraphs are regarded as independent letters of the alphabet in their own right. The capitalization of digraphs and trigraphs

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6634-427: The breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kurds replaced the Arabic script with two Latin alphabets. Although only the official Kurdish government uses an Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin Kurdish alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority of Kurdish -speakers. In 1957,

6741-428: The carriers of Olmec culture spoke a Mixe–Zoquean language and that words spread from their language into others because of their potential cultural dominance in the Preclassic period, though the relationship between the Olmec and other Preclassic groups is still debated (see Olmec influences on Mesoamerican cultures ). During this time the Oto-Manguean languages diversified and spread into Oaxaca and central Mexico. In

6848-443: The case for Classical Nahuatl and Classical Maya , both of which, at different times in history, have been used as a common language between different ethnic groups. Further complicating matters are the semi- nomadic lifestyle of many Mesoamerican peoples, and political systems which often have used relocation of entire communities as a political tool. Dialect or variant “chaining” is common, where any adjacent two or three towns in

6955-409: The coast of Oaxaca where their speech became the language Pochutec , and others moving all the way to El Salvador, becoming the ancestors of the speakers of modern Pipil . In the Postclassic period Nahuan languages diversified and spread, carried by the culture commonly known as Toltec . In the early Postclassic period feuds between royal lineages in the Yucatán Peninsula caused the forefathers of

7062-405: The collapse of the Derg and subsequent end of decades of Amharic assimilation in 1991, various ethnic groups in Ethiopia dropped the Geʽez script , which was deemed unsuitable for languages outside of the Semitic branch . In the following years the Kafa , Oromo , Sidama , Somali , and Wolaitta languages switched to Latin while there is continued debate on whether to follow suit for

7169-434: The colonial period on there exists an extensive Mesoamerican literature written in the Latin script . The literature and texts created by indigenous Mesoamericans are the earliest and well known from the Americas for two primary reasons. First, the fact that native populations in Mesoamerica were the first to interact with Europeans assured the documentation and survival of literature samples in intelligible forms. Second,

7276-531: The common ancestors of these families, referred to by linguists as proto-languages , were spoken are reconstructed by methods of historical linguistics. The three earliest known families of Mesoamerica are the Mixe–Zoquean languages , the Oto-Manguean languages and the Mayan languages . Proto-Oto-Manguean is thought to have been spoken in the Tehuacán valley between 5000 and 3000 BCE, although it may only have been one center of Oto-manguean culture, another possible Oto-Manguean homeland being Oaxaca. Proto-Mayan

7383-451: The convergence of certain linguistic traits across disparate language families. The Mesoamerican sprachbund is commonly referred to as the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area . The languages of Mesoamerica were also among the first to evolve independent traditions of writing . The oldest texts date to approximately 1000 BCE (namely Olmec and Zapotec ), though most texts in the indigenous scripts (such as Maya ) date to c. 600–900 CE. Following

7490-531: The correct representation of names and to simplify data exchange in Europe. This specification supports all official languages of European Union and European Free Trade Association countries (thus also the Greek and Cyrillic scripts), plus the German minority languages . To allow the transliteration of names in other writing systems to the Latin script according to the relevant ISO standards all necessary combinations of base letters and diacritic signs are provided. Efforts are being made to further develop it into

7597-544: The decline of indigenous languages in this period has probably been the social marginalization of the native populations and their languages – and this process has been particularly effective during modern times. In the modern period what has affected the indigenous languages most has been the pressure of social marginalization put on the indigenous populations by a growing mestizo class, a growing institutionalization of Hispanic society, and, in some cases, instances of violent suppression and mass murder against indigenous groups in

7704-806: The early Aztec empire. As Nahuatl, carried by the Toltec and later the Aztec culture, became a lingua franca throughout Mesoamerica even some Mayan states such as the Kʼicheʼ Kingdom of Qʼumarkaj adopted Nahuatl as a prestige language. In Oaxaca Zapotec and Mixtec peoples expanded their territories displacing speakers of the Tequistlatecan languages slightly. During this time the Purépecha (Tarascans) consolidated their state based at Tzintzuntzan . They were resistant to other states of Mesoamerica and had little contact with

7811-651: The end of the Archaic period). Throughout the history of Mesoamerica, an unknown number of languages and language families became extinct and left behind no evidence of their existence. What is known about the pre-Columbian history of the Mesoamerican languages is what can be surmised from linguistic, archeological and ethnohistorical evidence. Often, hypotheses concerning the linguistic prehistory of Mesoamerica rely on very little evidence. Three large language families are thought to have had their most recent common homelands within Mesoamerica. The time frames and locations in which

7918-625: The fall of the Teotihuacan empire. What is known is that in the years following Teotihuacan's fall Nahuan speakers quickly rose to power in central Mexico and expanded into areas earlier occupied by speakers of Oto-Manguean, Totonacan and Huastec. During this time Oto-Manguean groups of central Mexico such as the Chiapanec , Chorotega and Subtiaba migrated south some of them reaching the southern limits of Mesoamerica in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Also some speakers of Nahuan moved south, some settling on

8025-424: The first grammar of French. During this time some literacy in indigenous languages written in the Latin script began to appear. In 1570 Philip II of Spain decreed that Nahuatl should become the official language of the colonies of New Spain in order to facilitate communication between the Spanish and natives of the colonies. Throughout the colonial period grammars of indigenous languages were composed, but strangely

8132-466: The indigenous languages have been subject to varying policies imposed on them by the colonial rule. The first impact came from the decimation of the indigenous population by diseases brought by the Europeans. Within the first two centuries of Spanish rule Mesoamerica experienced a dramatic population decline and it is well documented that several small linguistic groups became completely extinct already during

8239-466: The journal American Anthropologist between 1978 and 1983. In the late 1990s, Campbell (1997) expressed that he believed that Mayan would indeed some day prove to be related to Mixe–Zoquean and Totonacan, but that previous studies have not proven sufficient. Nevertheless, since then, Brown et al. (2011) have presented arguments in favor of a Totozoquean , a common ancestor between Totonacan and Mixe-Zoquean. Moreover, Mora-Marín (2014, 2016) constitutes

8346-415: The languages use relational nouns to express spatial and other relations, they have a base 20 (Vigesimal) numeral system, their syntax is never verb-final and as a consequence of this they don't use switch reference , they use a distinct pattern for expressing nominal possession and they share a number of semantic calques ]. Some other traits are less defining for the area, but still prevalent such as:

8453-545: The largest numbers of speakers by far – each having speakers numbering more than a million. Many Mesoamerican languages today are either endangered or already extinct , but others, including the Mayan languages , Nahuatl , Mixtec and Zapotec , have several hundred thousand speakers and remain viable. The distinction between related languages and dialects is notoriously vague in Mesoamerica. The dominant Mesoamerican socio-cultural pattern through millennia has been centered around

8560-448: The last 20 years there has been an overt change in the policies of governments of Mesoamerican countries towards the indigenous languages. There has been official recognition of their right to existence and some kind of governmental support, to the point of recognizing them as national languages. Bilingual (rather than monolingual Spanish) education has been recognized as desirable even if not always actually achieved in practice. In Guatemala

8667-556: The letters contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet , which are the same letters as the English alphabet . Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system and is the most widely adopted writing system in the world. Latin script is used as the standard method of writing the languages of Western and Central Europe, most of sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, as well as many languages in other parts of

8774-630: The long tradition of Mesoamerican writing contributed to them readily embracing the Latin script used by the Spanish and resulted in many literary works written in it during the first centuries after the Spanish conquest of Mexico . Some important literary works in Mesoamerican languages are: The mythological narrative of the Popol Vuh and the theatrical dance-drama the Rabinal Achí both written in Classical Kʼicheʼ Maya . The ethnographical work in

8881-439: The millennia in which speakers of different Mesoamerican languages were engaged in contact the languages began to change and show similarities with one another. This has resulted in Mesoamerica evolving into a linguistic area of diffusion, a " Sprachbund ", where most languages, even though they have different origins share some important linguistic traits. The traits defining the Mesoamerican sprachbund are few but well established:

8988-660: The most recent attempt to test the relationship between Mayan and Mixe-Zoquean. He proposes the existence of regular sound correspondences among lexical and grammatical comparanda between the two. By transitivity, these two proposals would connect all three language families, rekindling the Macro-Mayan hypothesis as framed by McQuown. According to Campbell (1997), previous efforts to link Huave to Mayan, Mixe-Zoquean, Totonacan, or for that matter, any other language or family, has proven unfruitful, and Huave "should thus be considered an isolate" (Campbell 1997:161). Campbell (2024) considers

9095-518: The northern rim of the region and co-existing with speakers of Coracholan and Oto-Pamean languages . During the Classic period the linguistic situation simultaneously becomes both clearer and more obscure. While the Maya actually left examples of their writing, researchers have been unable to determine the linguistic affiliations of several important Classic civilizations, including Teotihuacan , Xochicalco , Cacaxtla , and El Tajín . During this time it

9202-508: The picture. The significance of measurements of intelligibility (which is itself difficult to measure) depends very much on analysts' purposes and theoretical commitments. In Spanish the word dialecto has often been used generically about indigenous languages in order to describe them as inherently inferior to the European languages. In recent years this has caused an aversion to the term “dialect” among Spanish-speaking linguists and others, and

9309-587: The postclassic period, expanded the realm of Mesoamerican cultural influence to include the Pacific coast of Nicaragua and the Nicoya Peninsula , which were previously part of the Isthmo-Colombian area and probably inhabited by Misumalpan and Chibchan speakers. The Guerrero subarea has been home to the Oto-Manguean Tlapanec and the unclassified Cuitlatec , and later Nahuatl , as well as

9416-454: The presence of whistled languages , incorporation of bodypart nouns into verbs, the derivation of locatives from bodypart nouns, grammatical indication of inalienable or intimate possession . Terrence Kaufman has worked with documenting the process of this linguistic convergence and he argues that the most probable donor languages of the borrowings into other Mesoamerican languages are the Mixe–Zoquean and Totonacan languages, this supports

9523-481: The proposal because of serious flaws in the methodology that had been applied. They rejected almost all of the 62 cognates. First and foremost they found it important to identify all cases of linguistic diffusion before collecting possible cognates because diffusion has been widespread within the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area . The exchanges between Brown and Witkowski and Campbell and Kaufman took place in

9630-449: The proposed connection between Mayan and Mixe-Zoquean to be likely, but doubts that the greater Macro-Mayan hypothesis is valid. Stark (1972) proposed a Maya–Yunga–Chipayan macrofamily linking Mayan with the Chimuan and Uru–Chipaya language families of South America. Below is a comparison of selected basic vocabulary items. Mesoamerican languages Mesoamerican languages are

9737-427: The quality of these were highest in the initial period and declined towards the ends of the 18th century. In practice the friars found that learning all the indigenous languages was impossible and they began to focus on Nahuatl. During this period the linguistic situation of Mesoamerica was relatively stable. However, in 1696 Charles II made a counter decree banning the use of any languages other than Spanish throughout

9844-688: The recognition of the indigenous languages as official languages and a valuable part of the country's identity came after the Civil War which ended in 1996. In Mexico shifting governments had talked about the value of the country's indigenous heritage but it was not until 2003 that the Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas established a framework for the conservation, nurturing and development of indigenous languages. Despite these official changes, old attitudes persist in many spheres, and indigenous languages are not in any practical sense on

9951-693: The rest of Mesoamerica. Probably as a result of their isolationist policy the Purépecha language is the only language of Mesoamerica to not show any of the traits associated with the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area. In Guerrero the Tlapanecs of Yopitzinco speaking the Oto-Manguean Tlapanec language remained independent of the Aztec empire as did some of the Oaxacan cultures such as the Mixtecs of Tututepec and

10058-554: The scripts of the Izapan culture. The best documented and deciphered Mesoamerican writing system, and hence the most widely known, is the classic Maya script . Post-Classic cultures such as the Aztec and Mixtec cultures do not seem to have developed true writing systems, but instead used semasiographic writing although they did use phonetic principles in their writing by the use of the rebus principle. Aztec name glyphs for example do combine logographic elements with phonetic readings. From

10165-466: The southern area began speaking Isthmus Nahuatl in the post-classic period. The areas of Central America (excluding the Maya areas) that formed part of Mesoamerica during the preclassic were dominated by Lencan speakers. Based on toponymy, it is possible that Xincan languages were originally spoken in western El Salvador, but were replaced by Nawat after postclassic migrations. The migrations of Subtiaba and Mangue speakers, possibly also during

10272-508: The southern part of the Maya area and the highlands the elite of the Classic Maya centers spoke a common prestige language based on Cholan, a variant often referred to as Classic Ch'olti'an . An important question that remains to be answered is what language or languages were spoken by the people and rulers of the empire of Teotihuacan. During the first part of the Classic period Teotihuacan achieved dominance over central Mexico and far into

10379-561: The speakers of several Uralic languages , most notably Hungarian , Finnish and Estonian . The Latin script also came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages , as the people who spoke them adopted Roman Catholicism . The speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic along with Orthodox Christianity . The Serbian language uses both scripts, with Cyrillic predominating in official communication and Latin elsewhere, as determined by

10486-492: The start of a new syllable, or distinguish between homographs such as the Dutch words een ( pronounced [ən] ) meaning "a" or "an", and één , ( pronounced [e:n] ) meaning "one". As with the pronunciation of letters, the effect of diacritics is language-dependent. English is the only major modern European language that requires no diacritics for its native vocabulary . Historically, in formal writing,

10593-410: The teaching of Spanish to their prospect converts but from 1555 the first Mexican Council established the policy that the Indians should be converted in their own languages and that parish priests should know the indigenous language of their parishioners. This called for a massive education of clergymen in native languages and the church undertook this task with great zeal. Institutions of learning such as

10700-568: The term variante has often been applied instead. Many Mesoamerican linguistic groupings have not had different names in common usage for their different languages and some linguistic groups known by a single name show a sufficiently significant variation to warrant division into a number of languages which are quite low in mutual intelligibility. This is the case for example for the Mixtecan, Zapotecan and Nahuan linguistic groups, which all contain distinct languages that are nonetheless referred to by

10807-530: The town or city as the highest level community rather than the nation, realm or people. This has meant that within Mesoamerica each city-state or town community, called in Nahuatl an altepetl , has had its own language standard which, in the typical case, has evolved separately from closely related but geographically remote languages. Even geographically close communities with closely related, mutually intelligible languages have not necessarily seen themselves as being ethnically related, or their language as being

10914-469: The use of logograms with a syllabary , and they are often called hieroglyphic scripts. Five or six different scripts have been documented in Mesoamerica but archaeological dating methods make it difficult to establish which was earliest and hence the forebear from which the others developed. Candidates for being the first writing system of the Americas are Zapotec writing , the Isthmian or Epi-Olmec script or

11021-481: The world. The script is either called Latin script or Roman script, in reference to its origin in ancient Rome (though some of the capital letters are Greek in origin). In the context of transliteration , the term " romanization " ( British English : "romanisation") is often found. Unicode uses the term "Latin" as does the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The numeral system

11128-523: The written letters in sequence. Examples are ⟨ ch ⟩ , ⟨ ng ⟩ , ⟨ rh ⟩ , ⟨ sh ⟩ , ⟨ ph ⟩ , ⟨ th ⟩ in English, and ⟨ ij ⟩ , ⟨ee⟩ , ⟨ ch ⟩ and ⟨ei⟩ in Dutch. In Dutch the ⟨ij⟩ is capitalized as ⟨IJ⟩ or the ligature ⟨IJ⟩ , but never as ⟨Ij⟩ , and it often takes

11235-402: Was derived from V for the consonant. In the case of I, a word-final swash form, j , came to be used for the consonant, with the un-swashed form restricted to vowel use. Such conventions were erratic for centuries. J was introduced into English for the consonant in the 17th century (it had been rare as a vowel), but it was not universally considered a distinct letter in the alphabetic order until

11342-667: Was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia . The Greek alphabet was altered by the Etruscans , and subsequently their alphabet was altered by the Ancient Romans . Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet. The Latin script is the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet , and the 26 most widespread letters are

11449-591: Was spoken in the Cuchumatanes highlands of Guatemala around 3000 BCE. Proto-Mixe–Zoquean was spoken on the gulf coast and on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and on the Guatemalan Pacific coast around 2000 BCE, in a much larger area than its current extension. Totonacan languages , Purépecha, Huave and the Tequistlatecan languages can also be assumed to have been present in Mesoamerica at this point although it

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