Proto-Otomi period and later precolonial period

The Oto-Pamean languages are thought to have split from the other Oto-Manguean languages around 3500 BC. Within the Otomian branch, Proto-Otomi seems to have split from Proto-Mazahua ca. 500 AD. Around 1000 AD, Proto-Otomi began diversifying into the modern Otomi varieties.^[7] Much of central Mexico was inhabited by speakers of the Oto-Pamean languages before the arrival of Nahuatl speakers; beyond this, the geographical distribution of the ancestral stages of most modern indigenous languages of Mexico, and their associations with various civilizations remain undetermined. It has been proposed that Proto-Otomi-Mazahua most likely was one of the languages spoken in Teotihuacan, the greatest Mesoamerican ceremonial center of the Classic period, the demise of which occurred ca. 600 AD.^[8]

The Precolumbian Otomi people did not have a fully developed writing system. However, Aztec writing, largely ideographic, could be read in Otomi as well as Nahuatl.^[8] The Otomi often translated names of places or rulers into Otomi rather than using the Nahuatl names. For example, the Nahuatl place name Tenochtitlān, "place of Opuntia cactus", was rendered as *ʔmpôndo in proto-Otomi, with the same meaning.^{[cn 3]}

Colonial period and Classical Otomi

Page written in 16th century Otomi from the Codex Huichapan

At the time of the Spanish conquest of central Mexico, Otomi had a much wider distribution than now, with sizeable Otomi speaking areas existing in the modern states of Jalisco and Michoacán.^[9] After the conquest, the Otomi people experienced a period of geographical expansion as the Spaniards employed Otomi warriors in their expeditions of conquest into northern Mexico. During and after the Mixtón rebellion, in which Otomi warriors fought for the Spanish, Otomis settled areas in Querétaro (where they founded the city of Querétaro) and Guanajuato which previously had been inhabited by nomadic Chichimecs.^[10] Because Spanish colonial historians such as Bernardino de Sahagún used primarily Nahua speakers primarily as sources for their histories of the colony, the Nahuas' negative image of the Otomi people was perpetuated throughout the colonial period. This tendency towards devaluing and stigmatizing the Otomi cultural identity relative to other Indigenous groups gave impetus to the process of language loss and mestizaje, as many Otomies opted to adopt the Spanish language and customs in search of social mobility.^[11]

"Classical Otomi" is the term used to define the Otomi spoken in the early centuries of colonial rule. This historical stage of the language was given Latin orthography and documented by Spanish friars who learned it in order to proselytize among the Otomi. Text in Classical Otomi is not readily comprehensible since the Spanish-speaking friars failed to differentiate the varied vowel and consonant phonemes used in Otomi.^[5] Friars and monks from the Spanish mendicant orders such as the Franciscans wrote Otomi grammars, the earliest of which is Friar Pedro de Cárceres's Arte de la lengua othomí [sic], written perhaps as early as 1580, but not published until 1907.^[12][13][14] In 1605, Alonso de Urbano wrote a trilingual Spanish-Nahuatl-Otomi dictionary, which included a small set of grammatical notes about Otomi. The grammarian of Nahuatl, Horacio Carochi, has written a grammar of Otomi, but no copies have survived. He is the author of an anonymous dictionary of Otomi (manuscript 1640). In the latter half of the eighteenth century, an anonymous Jesuit priest wrote the grammar Luces del Otomi (which is, strictly speaking, not a grammar but a report on research about Otomi ^[15]). Neve y Molina wrote a dictionary and a grammar.^{[16] [17]}

During the colonial period, many Otomis learned to read and write their language. Consequently, a significant number of Otomi documents exist from the period, both secular and religious, the most well-known of which are the Codices of Huichapan and Jilotepec.^{[cn 4]} In the late colonial period and after independence, indigenous groups no longer had separate status. At that time, Otomi lost its status as a language of education, ending Classical Otomi period as a literary language.^[5] This led to a declining numbers of speakers of indigenous languages, as Indigenous groups throughout Mexico adopted the Spanish language and Mestizo cultural identities. Coupled with a policy of castellanización this led to a rapid decline of speakers of all indigenous languages including Otomi, during the early 20th century.^[18]

Contemporary status

During the 1990s, however, the Mexican government made a reversal in policies towards indigenous and linguistic rights, prompted by the 1996 adoption of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights^{[cn 6]} and domestic social and political agitation by various groups such as social and political agitation by the EZLN and indigenous social movements. Decentralized government agencies were created and charged with promoting and protecting indigenous communities and languages; these include the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples (CDI) and the National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI).^[19] In particular, the federal Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas ("General Law on the Language Rights of the Indigenous Peoples"), promulgated on 13 March 2003, recognizes all of Mexico's indigenous languages, including Otomi, as "national languages", and gave indigenous people the right to speak them in every sphere of public and private life.^[20]

Current speaker demography and vitality

Currently, Otomi dialects are spoken by circa 239,000 speakers—some 5 to 6 percent of whom are monolingual—in widely scattered districts (see map).^[2] The highest concentration of speakers is found in the Valle de Mezquital region of Hidalgo and the southern portion of Querétaro. Some municipalities have concentrations of Otomi speakers as high as 60–70%.^[21] Because of recent migratory patterns, small populations of Otomi speakers can be found in new locations throughout Mexico and the United States. In the second half of the 20th century, speaker populations began to increase again, although at a slower pace than the general population. While absolute numbers of Otomi speakers continue to rise, their numbers relative to the Mexican population are falling.^[22]

Although Otomi is vigorous in some areas, with children acquiring the language through natural transmission (e.g. in the Mezquital valley and in the Highlands), it is an endangered language.^[23] Three dialects in particular have reached moribund status: those of Ixtenco (Tlaxcala state), Santiago Tilapa (Mexico state), and Cruz del Palmar (Guanajuato state).^[21] On the other hand, the level of monolingualism in Otomi is as high as 22.3% in Huehuetla, Hidalgo, and 13.1% in Texcatepec, Veracruz). Monolingualism is usually significantly higher among women than among men.^[24] Due to the politics from the 1920s to the 1980s that encouraged the "Hispanification" of indigenous communities and made Spanish the only language used in schools,^[18] no group of Otomi speakers today has general literacy in Otomi,^[25] while their literacy rate in Spanish remains far below the national average.^{[cn 7]}

Dialectology

Dialectologists tend to group the languages into three main groups that reflect historical relationships among the dialects: Northwestern Otomi spoken in the Mezquital Valley and surrounding areas of Hidalgo, Queretaro and Northern Mexico State, Southwestern Otomi spoken in the valley of Toluca, and Eastern Otomi spoken in the Highlands of Northern Puebla, Veracruz and Hidalgo, in Tlaxcala and two towns in the Toluca Valley, San Jerónimo Acazulco and Santiago Tilapa. The Northwestern varieties are characterized by an innovative phonology and grammar, whereas the Eastern varieties are more conservative.^[30][31][29]

The assignment of dialects to the three groups is as follows:^{[cn 9]}

• The Eastern group, including all dialects spoken east of the Valle del Mezquital in the center of the State of Hidalgo plus two village dialects from the State of Mexico; specifically: the Highland dialects (the Ethnologue's Highland Otomi, Texcatepec Otomi, and Tenango Otomi), Otomi of Santa Ana Hueytlalpan, as well as three dialects geographically distant from the preceding: the dialects of Tilapa and Acazulco in the state of Mexico, and finally the dialect of Ixtenco (Tlaxcala).
• The Northwestern area, comprising the dialects of Mezquital, Querétaro, and Guanajuato.
• The Southwestern group, including the so called State of Mexico dialect, Otomi of Chapa de Mota, Otomi of Jilotepec, Toluca Otomi, and Otomi of San Felipe los Alzatí, Michoacán. (In point of fact, all the foregoing, except of course for Alzatí, are spoken in the northern half of western lobe of the State of Mexico.)

Mutual intelligibility

Egland, Bartholomew & Cruz Ramos (1983) conducted mutual intelligibility tests in which they concluded that eight varieties of Otomi could be considered separate languages in regards to mutual intelligibility, with 80% intelligibility being needed for varieties to be considered part of the same language. They concluded that Texcatepec, Eastern Highland Otomi, and Tenango may be considered the same language at a lower threshold of 70% intelligibility. Ethnologue finds a similar lower level of 70% intelligibility between Querétaro, Mezquital, and Mexico State Otomi. The Ethnologue Temaoya Otomi is split off from Mexico State Otomi, and introduce Tilapa Otomi as a separate language; while Egland's poorly tested Zozea Otomi is subsumed under Anaya/Mezquital.

Phoneme inventory

The following phonological description is that of the dialect of San Ildefonso Tultepec, Querétaro, similar to the system found in the Valle del Mezquital variety, which is the most widely spoken Otomian variety.^{[cn 10]}

The phoneme inventory of the Proto-Otomi language from which all modern varieties have descended has been reconstructed as /p t k (kʷ) ʔ b d ɡ t͡s ʃ h z m n w j/, the oral vowels /i ɨ u e ø o ɛ a ɔ/, and the nasal vowels /ĩ ũ ẽ ɑ̃/.^[35][36][37]

Phonological diversity of the modern dialects

Modern dialects have undergone various changes from the common historic phonemic inventory. Most have voiced the reconstructed Proto-Otomian voiceless nonaspirate stops /p t k/ and now have only the voiced series /b d ɡ/. The only dialects to retain all the original voiceless nonaspirate stops are Otomi of Tilapa and Acazulco and the eastern dialect of San Pablito Pahuatlan in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, and Otomi of Santa Ana Hueytlalpan.^[38] A voiceless aspirate stop series /pʰ tʰ kʰ/, derived from earlier clusters of stop + [h], occurs in most dialects, but it has turned into the fricatives /ɸ θ x/ in most Western dialects. Some dialects have innovated a palatal nasal /ɲ/ from earlier sequences of *j and a nasal vowel.^[21] In several dialects, the Proto-Otomi clusters *ʔm and *ʔn before oral vowels have become /ʔb/ and /ʔd/, respectively.^[14] In most dialects *n has become /ɾ/, as in the singular determiner and the second person possessive marker. The only dialects to preserve /n/ in these words are the Eastern dialects, and in Tilapa these instances of *n have become /d/.^[38]

The tone system of Mezquital Otomi; most other dialects have similar systems

Many dialects have merged the vowels *ɔ and *a into /a/ as in Mezquital Otomi, whereas others such as Ixtenco Otomi have merged *ɔ with *o. The different dialects have between three and five nasal vowels. In addition to the four nasal vowels of proto-Otomi, some dialects have /õ/. Ixtenco Otomi has only /ẽ ũ ɑ̃/, whereas Toluca Otomi has /ĩ ũ ɑ̃/. In the Otomi of Cruz del Palmar, Guanjuato, the nasal vowels are /ĩ ũ õ/, the former *ɑ̃ having changed to /õ/.^{[cn 11]} Modern Otomi has borrowed many words from Spanish, in addition to new phonemes that occur only in loan words, such as /l/ that appears in some Otomi dialects instead of the Spanish trilled [r], and /s/, which is not present in native Otomi vocabulary either.^[39][40]

Tone and stress

All Otomi languages are tonal, and most varieties have three tones, high, low and rising.^{[14][cn 12]} One variety of the Sierra dialect, that of San Gregorio, has been analyzed as having a fourth, falling tone.^[41] In Mezquital Otomi, suffixes are never specified for tone,^[42] while in Tenango Otomi, the only syllables not specified for tone are prepause syllables and the last syllable of polysyllabic words.

Stress in Otomi is not phonemic but rather falls predictably on every other syllable, with the first syllable of a root always being stressed.^[43]

Classical Otomi

Colonial documents in Classical Otomi do not generally capture all the phonological contrasts of the Otomi language. Since the friars who alphabetized the Otomi populations were Spanish speakers, it was difficult for them to perceive contrasts that were present in Otomi but absent in Spanish, such as nasalisation, tone, the large vowel inventory as well as aspirated and glottal consonants. Even when they recognized that there were additional phonemic contrasts in Otomi they often had difficulties choosing how to transcribe them and with doing so consistently. No colonial documents include information on tone. The existence of nasalization is noted by Cárceres, but he does not transcribe it. Cárceres used the letter æ for the low central unrounded vowel [ʌ] and æ with cedille for the high central unrounded vowel ɨ.^[44] He also transcribed glottalized consonants as geminates e.g. ttz for [t͡sʔ].^[44] Cárceres used grave-accented vowels è and ò for [ɛ] and [ɔ]. In the 18th century Neve y Molina used vowels with macron ē and ō for these two vowels and invented extra letters (an e with a tail and a hook and an u with a tail) to represent the central vowels.^[45]

Practical orthography for modern dialects

Sign written in Otomi and Spanish in the Mezquital Valley:

BIENVENIDOS A IXMIQUILPAN
HOGÄ EHE NTS'U̲TK'ANI
CORAZON DEL VALLE DEL MEZQUITAL

Orthographies used to write modern Otomi have been a focus of controversy among field linguists for many years. Particularly contentious is the issue of whether or not to mark tone, and how, in orthographies to be used by native speakers. Many practical orthographies used by Otomi speakers do not include tone marking. Bartholomew^[46] has been a leading advocate for the marking of tone, arguing that because tone is an integrated element of the language's grammatical and lexical systems, the failure to indicate it would lead to ambiguity. Bernard (1980) on the other hand, has argued that native speakers prefer a toneless orthography because they can almost always disambiguate using context, and because they are often unaware of the significance of tone in their language, and consequently have difficulty learning to apply the tone diacritics correctly. For Mezquital Otomi, Bernard accordingly created an orthography in which tone was indicated only when necessary to disambiguate between two words and in which the only symbols used were those available on a standard Spanish language typewriter (employing for example the letter c for [ɔ], v for [ʌ], and the symbol + for [ɨ]). Bernard's orthography has not been influential and in used only in the works published by himself and the Otomi author Jesus Salinas Pedraza.^[47][48]

Practical orthographies used to promote Otomi literacy have been designed and published by the Instituto Lingüístico de Verano^{[cn 13]} and later by the national institute for indigenous languages (INALI). Generally they use diareses ë and ö to distinguish the low mid vowels [ɛ] and [ɔ] from the high mid vowels e and o. High central vowel [ɨ] is generally written ʉ or u̱, and front mid rounded vowel [ø] is written ø or o̱. Letter a with trema, ä, is sometimes used for both the nasal vowel [ã] and the low back unrounded vowel [ʌ]. Glottalized consonants are written with apostrophe (e.g. tz' for [t͡sʔ]) and palatal sibilant [ʃ] is written with x.^[49] This orthography has been adopted as official by the Otomi Language Academy centered in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo and is used on road signs in the Mezquital region and in publications in the Mezquital variety, such as the large 2004 SIL dictionary published by Hernández Cruz, Victoria Torquemada & Sinclair Crawford (2004). A slightly modified version is used by Enrique Palancar in his grammar of the San Ildefonso Tultepec variety.^[50]

Pronominal system: Person and Number

Originally, all dialects distinguished singular, dual and plural numbers, but some of the more innovative dialects, such as those of Querétaro and of the Mezquital area, distinguish only singular and plural numbers, sometimes using the previous dual forms as a paucal number.^[55] The Ixtenco dialect distinguishes singular, plural, and mass plural numbers.^[56][57] The personal prefixes distinguish four persons, making for a total of eleven categories of grammatical person in most dialects.^[21] The grammatical number of nouns is indicated by the use of articles; the nouns themselves are unmarked for number.

In most dialects, the pronominal system distinguishes four persons (first person inclusive and exclusive, second person and third person) and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). The system below is from the Toluca dialect.^[58]

The following atypical pronominal system from Tilapa Otomi lacks the inclusive/exclusive distinction in the first person plural and the dual/plural distinction in the second person.^[59]

Nouns

Otomi nouns are marked only for their possessor; plurality is expressed via pronouns and articles. There is no case marking. The particular pattern of possessive inflection is a widespread trait in the Mesoamerican linguistic area: there is a prefix agreeing in person with the possessor, and if the possessor is plural or dual, then the noun is also marked with a suffix that agrees in number with the possessor. Demonstrated below is the inflectional paradigm for the word ngų́ "house" in the dialect of Toluca.^[58]

Verbs

Verb morphology is synthetic and has elements of both fusion and agglutination.^{[cn 1][60]}

Verb stems are inflected through a number of different processes: the initial consonant of the verb root changes according to a morphophonemic pattern of consonant mutations to mark present vs. non-present, and active vs. passive.^[50][61] Verbal roots may take a formative syllable or not depending on syntactic and prosodic factors.^[62] A nasal prefix may be added to the root to express reciprocality or middle voice.^[63] Some dialects, notably the eastern ones, have a system of verb classes that take different series of prefixes. These conjugational categories have been lost in the Western dialects, although they existed in the Western areas in the colonial period as can be seen from Cárceres's grammar.^[29]

Verbs are inflected for either direct object or indirect object (but not for both simultaneously) by suffixes. The categories of person of subject, tense, aspect, and mood are marked simultaneously with a formative which is either a verbal prefix or a proclitic depending on analysis.^[40][64] These proclitics can also precede nonverbal predicates.^[41][65] The dialects of Toluca and Ixtenco distinguish the present, preterit, perfect, imperfect, future, pluperfect, continuative, imperative, and two subjunctives. Mezquital Otomi has additional moods.^[66] On transitive verbs, the person of the object is marked by a suffix. If either subject or object is dual or plural, it is shown with a plural suffix following the object suffix. So the structure of the Otomi verb is as follows:

Syntax

Otomi has the nominative–accusative alignment, but by one analysis there are traces of an emergent active–stative alignment.^[65]

Numerals

Like all other languages of the Mesoamerican linguistic area, Otomi has a vigesimal number system. The following numerals are from Classical Otomi as described by Cárceres. The e prefixed to all numerals except one is the plural nominal determiner (the a associated with -nʔda being the singular determiner).^[14]

Loan words

Otomi languages have borrowed words from both Spanish and Nahuatl. The phonological structure of loanwords is assimilated to Otomi phonology. Since Otomi lacks the trill /r/, this sound is normally altered to [l], as in lódá from Spanish ruda 'rue (medicinal herb)', while Spanish /l/ can be borrowed as the tap /ɾ/ as in baromaʃi 'dove' from Spanish 'paloma'. The Spanish voiceless stops /p, t, k/ are usually borrowed as their voiced counterparts as in bádú 'duck' from Spanish pato 'duck'. Loanwords from Spanish with stress on the first syllable are usually borrowed with high tone on all syllables as in: sábáná 'blanket' from Spanish sábana 'bedsheet'. Nahuatl loanwords include ndɛ̌nt͡su 'goat' from Nahuatl teːnt͡soneʔ 'goat' (literally "beard possessor"), and different forms for the Nahuatl word for 'pig', pitso:tɬ. Both of these loans have obviously entered Otomi in the colonial period after the Spanish introduced those domestic animals.^[39] In the period before Spanish contact it appears that borrowing between Nahuatl and Otomi was sparse whereas there are numerous instances of loan translations from that period, probably due to widespread bilingualism.^[78]