| Huave | |
|---|---|
| Ombeayiiüts,Umbeyajts | |
| Native to | Mexico |
| Region | Oaxaca |
| Ethnicity | Huave people |
Native speakers | 20,000 (2020 census)[1] |
| Dialects |
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | Variously:hue – San Francisco del Marhuv – San Mateo del Marhve – San Dionisio del Marhvv – Santa María del Mar, Oaxaca |
| Glottolog | huav1256 |
| ELP | Huave |
| This article containsIPA phonetic symbols. Without properrendering support, you may seequestion marks, boxes, or other symbols instead ofUnicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA. | |
Huave (also spelledWabe) is alanguage isolate spoken by the indigenousHuave people on the Pacific coast of theMexicanstate ofOaxaca. The language is spoken in four villages on theIsthmus of Tehuantepec, in the southeast of the state, by around 20,000 people (see table below).
Constenla Umaña (1994) suggests that Huave may have been the language of the Tacacho, a group that lived in a town called Yacacoyaua located inMaribio territory in sixteenth-century Nicaragua.[2]
The Huave people ofSan Mateo del Mar, who call themselvesIkoots, meaning "us", refer to their language asombeayiiüts, meaning "our language". In San Francisco del Mar, the corresponding terms areKunajts ("us") andumbeyajts ("our language"). The term "Huave" is thought to come from theZapotec languages, meaning "people who rot in the humidity", according to the 17th-century Spanish historianBurgoa. However, Martínez Gracida (1888) claims the meaning of the term means 'many people' inIsthmus Zapotec, interpretinghua as "abundant" andbe as a shortened form ofbinni ("people"). The etymology of the term requires further investigation. Neither of the above etymologies is judged plausible by Isthmus Zapotec speakers.[citation needed]
Although genetic relationships between the Huave language and several language families have been proposed, none has been substantiated, and Huave continues to be considered an isolate (Campbell 1997 pg. 161). Paul Radin proposed a relationship between Huave and theMayan andMixe–Zoquean languages, andMorris Swadesh proposed a connection to theOto-Manguean languages that has been further investigated by Rensch (1976), but all proposals have been inconclusive.
An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)[3] found lexical similarities among Huave,Totozoquean, andChitimacha. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the similarities could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.
While Huave is still in use in most domains of social life in at least one of the four villages where it is spoken, it is anendangered language. Recently, fieldwork andrevitalization projects have been carried out in the Huave communities by universities of different countries.
As of 2011, it is reported that teenagers have taken totexting in Huave, so as to be able to communicate without their parents' knowing what they are saying.[4] (TheMexican Kickapoos’whistled speech was developed around 1915 for much the same reason.)[5][6] Also as of 2011, a radio station in San Mateo del Mar, Radio Ikoots, was broadcasting in Huave.[7]
Huave of San Mateo del Mar is partly tonal, distinguishing between high and low tone in penultimate syllables only. Huave is one of only twoMesoamerican languages not to have a phonemicglottal stop (the other isPurépecha).
The phonemic inventory, reconstructed for the common ancestor of the four existing Huave varieties as presented in Campbell 1997, is as follows:
These phonemes are from the phonology of San Francisco del Mar Huave. The San Dionisio del Mar dialect has an additional vowel phoneme, /y/, cognate with /e/ in San Mateo.[8]
Vowels: /i, e, u, o, ɑ/. All vowels have aspirated forms.[9]
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | labialized | ||||||
| Stop | voiceless | p | t | k | kʷ | ||
| prenasalized | ᵐb | ⁿd | ᵑɡ | ᵑɡʷ | |||
| Affricate | voiceless | t͡s | |||||
| prenasalized | ⁿt͡s | ||||||
| Fricative | ɸ | s | h | ||||
| Nasal | m | n | |||||
| Approximant | w | l | j | ||||
| Trill | r | ||||||
| Flap | ɾ | ||||||
Huave is similar to theMayan languages in being both morphologically and syntacticallyergative and consistentlyhead-marking.[10] It is less morphologically complex than Mayan languages, however, and usually each word has only a fewaffixes.[11] There are obligatory categories on theverb ofabsolutiveperson andpresent,past orfuturetense, plus additional categories of transitive subject, indefinite subject andreflexive.[11]
Complex sentences in Huave often juxtapose multiple verbs each inflected for the appropriate person. An interesting feature of Huave is that verbs meaning "give" can be used to producecausative meaning,[12] whilst a verb meaning "come" is used to producepurpose clauses (i.e. meaning "in order to" in English). There are other purpose clauses introduced by more ordinary particles in which the verb is inflected for a special subordinate mode.
Word order, like verb morphology, in Huave follows a fully ergative pattern. The basic word order can be expressed very simply asErgative Verb Absolutive.[13] This means that whilst intransitive clauses the word order isAVO, inintransitive clauses the word order is verb–subject (VS).Adjectives anddemonstratives can be placed either before or after the noun to which they refer, whilstnumerals obligatorily precede their nouns.
Reduplication is a very productive phonological process in Huave. The verb root is reduplicated and the newly formed word's meaning is an intensified or repeated version of the meaning of the base verb. Huave also contains some partial reduplication, where only part of the root is reduplicated (typically its final VC sequence). Unlike full reduplication, this process is not productive.[14]
Huave is spoken in the four coastal towns of San Francisco del Mar, San Dionisio del Mar, San Mateo del Mar and Santa Catarina del Mar. The most vibrant speech community is in San Mateo del Mar which was fairly isolated until recently. Negative speakers' attitudes towards their language and a strong social pressure from the dominantSpanish language are the main reasons for the endangerment of Huave.
| Dialect and place | Number of Speakers (ca.) | ISO 639-3 (SIL) |
|---|---|---|
| San Dionisio del Mar | 5,000 | hve |
| San Francisco del Mar | 900 | hue |
| San Mateo del Mar | 12,000 | huv |
| Santa María del Mar | 500 | hvv |
Although considered separate languages by SIL according to the needs of literacy materials, Campbell (1997) considers them dialects of a single language.INALI distinguishes two varieties, Eastern (Dionisio and Francisco) and Western (Mateo and Maria).
Practical orthographies are currently in use by literate speakers in San Mateo, San Francisco, San Dionisio and Santa María del Mar. There is an effort going on by the Mexican INALI (National Institute for Indigenous Languages) to standardize the orthography together with speakers from all four communities.
The following text-sample is a passage from Cuentos Huaves III published by theInstituto Lingüístico de Verano:[15]
Tambüw
chüc
ambiyaw
chüc
xicuüw,
Tambüw chüc ambiyaw chüc xicuüw,
'Twocompadres went to kill deer'
ambiyaw
chüc
coy,
nggwaj.
Apiüng
chüc
nop:
ambiyaw chüc coy, nggwaj. Apiüng chüc nop:
'and they went to kill rabbits. One (of them) said:'
—Tabar
combül,
ambiyar
coya,
ambiyar
xicuüwa,
ambiyar
püecha
—aw
chüc.
—Tabar combül, ambiyar coya, ambiyar xicuüwa, ambiyar püecha —aw chüc.
'Let's go,compadre, to kill rabbits, deer andchachalacas'.
—Nggo
namb
—aw
chüc.
—Nggo namb —aw chüc.
'I won't go', he said'.
