- Cuicatec
The Cuicatecs are an indigenous group of the
Mexican state ofOaxaca , closely related to theMixtec s. They inhabit two towns:Teutila andTepeuxila in western Oaxaca. According to the 2000 census, they number around 23,000, of whom an estimated 65% are speakers of the language. [Website of the Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas, http://www.cdi.gob.mx/index.php?id_seccion=660, accessed 28 July 2008.]The name Cuicatec is a
Nahuatl exonym , from [IPA|kʷika] 'song' [teka] 'inhabitant of place of'. [Campbell 1997:402)]The Cuicatec language is an
Oto-Manguean language ofMexico . It belongs to the Mixtecan branch together with theMixtec languages and theTrique language . [ The proposal to group Mixtec, Trique and Cuicatec into a single family (none more closely related to one than to the other) was made by Longacre (1957) with convincing evidence.] TheEthnologue lists two major dialects of Cuicatec. Like other Oto-Manguean languages, Cuicatec is tonal.Cuicatec-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio station
XEOJN , based inSan Lucas Ojitlán ,Oaxaca .Notes
Bibliography
*Anderson, E. Richard & Hilario Concepción R. 1983. Diccionario cuicateco: español-cuicateco, cuicateco-español. Mexico City: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.
*Bradley, David P. 1991. A preliminary syntactic sketch of Concepción Pápalo Cuicatec. In C. Henry Bradley and Barbara E. Hollenbach (eds.), Studies in the syntax of Mixtecan languages 3, pp. 409-506. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington.
*Campbell, Lyle. 1997. "American Indian languages: the historical linguistics of Native America". Oxford: Oxford University Press.
*Needham, Doris & Marjorie Davis. 1946. Cuicateco phonology. International Journal of American Linguistics 12: 139-46.
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