The Totonacan languages (also known as Totonac–Tepehua languages) are a family of closely related languages spoken by approximately 290,000 Totonac (approx. 280,000) and Tepehua (approx. 10,000) people in the states of Veracruz, Puebla, and Hidalgo in Mexico. At the time of the Spanish conquest Totonacan languages were spoken all along the gulf coast of Mexico.^[1] During the colonial period, Totonacan languages were occasionally written and at least one grammar was produced.^[2] In the 20th century the number of speakers of most varieties have dwindled as indigenous identity increasingly became stigmatized encouraging speakers to adopt Spanish as their main language.^[3]

The Totonacan languages have only recently been compared to other families on the basis of historical-comparative linguistics, though they share numerous areal features with other languages of the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area, such as the Mayan languages and Nahuatl. Recent work suggests a possible genetic link to the Mixe–Zoque language family,^[4] although this has yet to be firmly established.

Internal classification

The family is divided into two branches, Totonac and Tepehua. Of the two, Tepehua is generally considered to consist of three languages—Pisaflores, Huehuetla, and Tlachichilco—while the Totonac branch is considerably more diverse. MacKay (1999) divides Totonac into four divisions, based on García Rojas (1978):

• Papantla Totonac: spoken in El Escolín, Papantla, Cazones, Tajín, Espinal, and other towns along the Gulf Coast of Veracruz.
• North-Central Totonac: spoken roughly between Poza Rica in Veracruz and Mecapalapa, Pantepec, and Xicotepec de Juárez in Puebla.
• South-Central Totonac: spoken mostly in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, including the towns of Zapotitlán de Méndez, Coatepec, and Huehuetla in Puebla.
• Misantla Totonac: spoken in Yecuatla and other communities outside the city of Misantla.

Ethnologue currently recognizes 12 languages in the Totonacan family, three Tepehua languages and nine Totonac:

This classification is the basis of the latest version of the ISO language codes for Totonacan, although some of these classifications are disputed.

The Mexican Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas (INALI) recognizes 10 distinct languages or "linguistic variants" in the family, 3 Tepehua and 7 Totonac (INALI 2008):^[5]

Coyutla Totonac is grouped with South Central Totonac by INALI while Tecpatlán Totonac is included in the North Central Totonac group. Other recent attempts at classification have suggested that some of these divisions, particularly North Central, Costal, and South Central, and are far too broad and include varieties that might also be classified as separate languages (Beck 2011; Brown et al. 2011; Levy & Beck (eds.) 2012).

A further drawback of the Ethnologue and INALI classifications is the lack of lower-level subgroups beyond the two-way division into Totonac and Tepehua. In the Totonac branch of the family, Misantla is the most distinctive, and the remaining languages form a more closely related group (Arana Osnaya 1953). Divisions amongst the latter group, which might be referred to as "Central Totonac," are unclear, though most researchers agree that there is at least a three-way division between Northern, Southern/Sierra, and Lowland/Coastal varieties (Arana Osnaya 1953; Ichon 1969; Brown et al. 2011). Recent efforts at reconstruction and evidence from lexical similarity further suggest that Southern/Sierra and Lowland group together against Northern (Brown et al. 2011), although this is still uncertain, pending more exhaustive investigation. The most recent proposal for the family is as follows (Brown et al. 2011; Levy & Beck (eds.) 2012):

• Tepehua
  • Pisaflores
  • Huehuetla
  • Tlachichilco
• Totonac
  • Misantla
  • Central Totonac
    • Northern Totonac
      • Upper Necaxa
      • Tecpatlán Totonac
      • Zihuateutla Totonac
      • Cerro Xinolatépetl Totonac (also known as Ozumatlán)
      • Apapantilla Totonac (also known as Xicotepec)
    • Lowland–Sierra
      • Filomeno Mata
      • Lowland Totonac (many varieties, incl. Papantla)
      • Sierra Totonac (also known as Highland Totonac)
        • Coatepec
        • Coyutla
        • Huehuetla Totonac
        • Ozelonacaxtla
        • Olintla
        • Zapotitlán de Méndez

Lexical comparison also suggests that, for Tepehua, Pisaflores and Huehuetla may be more closely related to each other than either is to Tlalchichilco (Brown et al. 2011).

MacKay and Trechsel (2018) provide the following internal classification:^[6]

Totonac-Tepehua

• Totonac
  • Sierra Totonac: Zapotitlán, Coatepec, Huehuetla (Chilocoyo del Carmen), Caxhuácan, Ozelonacaxtla
  • Papantla Totonac: El Escolín, El Tajín, El Carbón, Papantla
  • Northern Totonac: Apapantilla, Patla, Chicontla, Cacahuatlán, Filomeno Mata, San Pedro Tlaolantongo
  • Misantla Totonac: Yecuatla, San Marcos Atexquilapan, Jilotepec
• Tepehua
  • Tlachichileo Tepehua: Tlachichileo, Tierra Colorada, Chintipán, Tecomajapa
  • Pisaflores Tepehua: Pisaflores, El Tepetate, San Pedro Tziltzacuapan, San José el Salto
  • Huehuetla Tepehua: Huehuetla (Hidalgo), Barrio Atzlán, Linda Vista (Mirasol), Mecapalapa (Puebla)

Phonology

There is some variation in the sound systems of the different varieties of Totonac and Tepehua, but the following phoneme inventory can be considered a typical Totonacan inventory (Aschman 1946).

Grammar

From a typological perspective, the Totonac–Tepehua family presents a fairly consistent profile, and exhibits many features of the Mesoamerican areal type, such as a preference for verb-initial order, head-marking, and extensive use of body part morphemes in metaphorical and locative constructions (Levy & Beck (eds.) 2012). The Totonacan languages are highly agglutinative and polysynthetic with nominative/accusative alignment and a flexible constituent order governed by information structure. Syntactic relations between the verb and its arguments are marked by agreement with the subject and one or sometimes two objects. There is no morphological case on nouns and many languages in the family lack prepositions, making use instead of a rich system of causatives, applicatives, and prefixes for body parts and parts of objects. Possession is marked on the possessed noun, the head of the NP. Otherwise, nouns are uninflected, number being an optional category and grammatical gender being absent from the languages. Numerals quantifying nouns bear classificatory prefixes, something that is unusual cross-linguistically as affixal classifiers tend heavily to be suffixes (Aikhenvald 2003). Totonacan languages are also known for their use of sound symbolism.

Totonacan vocabulary

The following selection of Proto-Totonacan reconstructions and descendants is taken from MacKay and Trechsel (2018),^[6] using data from several other studies. The reconstructions and descendants are written in Americanist notation.

Media

Totonacan-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio station XECTZ-AM, broadcasting from Cuetzalan, Puebla.

Manuscript about the language dated 1891

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Totonacan languages.

Wiktionary has a list of reconstructed forms at Appendix:Proto-Totonacan reconstructions

References

External links

• Upper Necaxa Totonac Project
• "CLAS postgrad researcher Lucia Brandi in publishing first for Mexican indigenous language, Kgoyom Totonaco". SOCLAS Blog. 2012-07-25. Retrieved 2012-08-07.

Bibliography