Opata language

Ópata
Spoken in	Mexico (traditionally Sonora state, now D.F.)
Language family	Uto-Aztecan Taracahitic Ópata
Language codes
ISO 639-3	opt

Ópata (Also Eudeve, Heve, Dohema) is the name of the Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Opata people of northern central Sonora in Mexico. It was believed to be dead already in 1930, and Carl Sofus Lumholtz reported the Opata to have become "Mexicanized" and lost their language and customs already when traveling through Sonora in the 1890s, but in a recent (1993) survey by the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (Now INALI) fifteen people in the Mexican Federal District self identified as speakers of Ópata [1] – this may not mean however that the language is actually living, since linguistic nomenclature in Mexico is notoriously fuzzy. And no studies documenting the language spoken by those fifteen persons have been published. If the fifteen persons were in fact speakers of the Uto-Aztecan Ópata language then the language is severely endangered and if not it is probably already extinct. Sometimes Eudeve and Opata are considered distinct languages and sometimes merely dialects of one single language.

Morphology

Opata is an agglutinative language, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several morphemes strung together.

References

• Lombardo, Natal. 1702. "Arte de la Lengua Teguima vulgarmente llamada Opata". México: Miguel de Ribera.
• Lombardo, Natal. n.d., ca. 1702. Arte de la Lengua Teguima vulgarmente llamada Opata. Ayer ms. 1641. Newberry Library, Chicago.
• Loaysa, Balthasar, unknown year, Arte de la lengua hegue. Ms. in Bibliothèque Nationale, París; copia de W.E. Gates en la Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago.
• Lionnet, Andrés. 1979. El lexico del eudeve. Mimeography. Friends of Uto-Aztecan Working Conference, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropologicas, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico, June 23. : .
• Miller, Wick R., 1983, "A Note on Extinct Languages of Northwest Mexico of Supposed Uto-Aztecan Affiliation", International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 49, No. 3, Papers Presented at a Symposium on Uto-Aztecan Historical Linguistics (Jul., 1983), pp. 328–334
• Shaul, David Leedom, 1989 "Teguima (Opata) phonology", Southwestern Journal of Linguistics 9:150-162. ...
• Shaul, David Leedom, 1990, "Teguima (Opata) Inflectional Morphology", International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Oct., 1990), pp. 561–573
• Smith, Buckingham
• Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language at Project Gutenberg
• Ethnologe on Òpata language