Languages of Latin America for HUM 2461

I. Spanish:

This is the principal language used in all of the Spanish-speaking countries, as either the one official language or as of of the two official languages. Spanish is one of the main Romance languages, which means that much of its vocabulary, sounds, and grammar is derived from the language of Rome; to wit, Latin. Actually, 70% of Spanish is derived from Latin; the other 30% comes from Arabic. This means that Spanish is set up to incorporate elements from other languages, and, indeed, in Latin America, Spanish has adopted a significant vocabulary from native languages (and, of course, other languages such as English). About 450,000,000 speak Spanish as their first native language around the world, and it is the language that dominates Latin America. There are a number of dialects, the two principal ones being Castilian, spoken in much of Spain, and Latin American, spoken throughout Spanish America. Other special regional dialects are found in the Caribbean, the River Plate area, Central America, etc. A special feature of Spanish is that speakers almost all Spanish dialects can understand each other without major difficulties. Vocabulary varies widely, but this fact does not impede communication.

Spanish is an analytic language, which means that word order syntax (commonly: subject, verb, complement) is crucial in determining meaning of sentences. Spanish has a five-vowel system featuring "a", "e", "i", "o", and "u". Verbs, each with up to 72 different forms (morphemes) in various tenses (past, present, future) and moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive), are the expressive core of Spanish.

II. Portuguese:

This is the official language of Brazil. It is the second most important language in Latin America. Indeed, it is spoken by about 180,000 people as a native language. Portuguese is one of the Romance languages, which means that much of its vocabulary, sounds, and grammar is derived from the language of Rome; to wit, Latin. About 85% of Portuguese is derived from Latin; the other 15% comes from Arabic.

III. French:

This is the principal language of the French-speaking province of Québec in Canada; it is one of the two official languages of all of Canada; it is one of the two official languages of Haiti (the other is Créole), and it is the language spoken on various Caribbean islands and in French Guiana. It is also one of the two official languages of the American state of Louisiana, and it is spoken as a native, but unofficial language in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Like Spanish and Portuguese, French is one of the main Romance languages, its vocabulary, sounds, and grammar are derived from the language of Rome; to wit, Latin. about 80% of French is derived from Latin; the other 20% comes from Germanic languages (Frankish, German, etc.) and other languages, most recently, for example, English.

IV. Maya:

This is the native language of 8,400,000 people in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Honduras. This language was spoken in Mesoamerica before the arrival of various peoples from Europe, and it is still spoken today in a variety of dialects, some of which are so mutually unintelligible as to be considered separate languages. Mayan belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family of languages spoken natively in both North America and Central America. The Aztecan branch of this language family is reviewed below. Mayan was and is spoken entirely within the borders of what we now call Central America. Among the living Mayan languages are Kekchi, Mam, Yucatec, Quiché, and Cakchiquel. According to the Yucatecan scholar M. Zavala, there are six parts of speech in Yucatecan Maya: noun, adjective, verb, adverb, conjunction, and interjection. As for verbs, Maya has two verbal conjugations, no auxiliary verbs, three tenses (present, past, and future), and there are many fewer irregular verbs than there are in Spanish. There are 21 letters in the Mayan alphabet, seven of which are pronounced differently from Spanish. Nouns have two numbers, singular and plural (boy = xipal; boys = xipalob) and the following gender characteristics: inanimate nouns are neuter while natural masculine gender nouns have the prefix ah and natural feminine nouns have the prefix ix (the male teacher = ah cambezah; the female teacher = ix cambezah). Nowadays, however, one hears the prefix le for both human genders (le xib = the man; le chup = the woman) or xibil for males (xibilpal = the boy) and chupul for females (chupupal = the girl). Here is a list of numbers: 1, hun; 2, ca; 3, ox; 4, can; 5, ho; 6, uac; 7, uuc; 8, uaxac; 9, bolon; 10, lahun. 20, hunkal. Multiples of 20 continue thus with the use of kal: 2 x 20 = cakal; 3 x 20 = oxkal; etc.

V. Náhuatl:

This is the native of about 4,000,000 people in central and south-central Mexico. This was the principal language of the Mexica people in the central valley of Anáhuac, where Mexico City has been for the past 500 years; it was the principal imperial language and trade language of the Aztec empire throughout Mesoamerica for the last two centuries before the Spanish conquest in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Currently, this language is spoken by about a two million people, principally in the central Mexico highlands. According to Mexican national law, Nahuatl is a "national language" along with Spanish and other Mexican indigenous languages. (Other Uto-Aztecan languages are Comanche, Hopi, Paiute, Pima, Ute, Shoshone, Tarahumara, and Yaqui.) In linguistic terms, Nahuatl is aggluntinative and synthetic, which means that it uses compounding (e.g. quetzal-cóatl = Quetalcóatl), incorporation, and derivation. Hence, Nahuatl has many prefixes and suffixes, which process can make very long words. Official Mexican Spanish has borrowed about a thousand words from Nahuatl. Here are some frequently used words that come from Nahuatl: avocado (ahuacatl; aguacate in Spanish); Aztec/azteca (aztecatl); cacao (cacahuatl); chicle (tzichtli: Spanish for "gum"); chile / chili (chilli); chocolate (xocolatl); coyote (coyotl); Guatemala (cuauhtēmallan); Mexico (mexihco); tomato (xi-tomatl; tomate or jitomate in Mexican Spanish), and hundreds of placenames from Mexico to Nicaragua. The words endings in tl, tli, and li indicate that such words are nouns. Below are a few key Náhuatl terms (Source: Diccionario de la lengua nahuatl o mexicana. Ed. Remi Simeon. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1997). Notice that no Náhuatl words begin with the letter 'b', 'd', 'f', 'g', 'r', and others.

ac	who	Moteuhçoma	emperor Moctezuma, Montezuma
acalli	boat	octli	fermented beverage from maguey; pulque
acatl	reed (name of year and day)	Quauhtémoc	Last Aztec governor; killed by Cortés
Acolman	town north of Texcoco and Tenochtitlán	Quetzalcóatl	god of wind, plumed serpent god (1 cane)
ayatl	cloak of fine cotton or maguey	quetzalli	feather, treasure, jewel, lord, protector
amatl	paper, card	Tenochtitlán	capital city of the Mexica/Aztecs
Anáhuac	Valley of Mexico	teocalli	temple
atl	water, head, war	teootl	god
aztatl	heron	Teotihuacan	major pre-Aztec city N of Mexico City
azteca	Aztecs	Tepeyacac	mountain peak; Guadalupe's town
Aztlán	original place of Aztecs near heado Gulf of California	Tepotzlán	city near Popocatépetl volcano
calli	house, hut	Tezcatlipoca	"Shining Mirror;" great Aztec god of universe and much more; jaguar god
cemanayatl (cemanauac)	world (in the world)	tilmatli	cloak, mantle, cloth
Cempoallan	city SW of Veracruz; Spaniards' first conquest	tlatoani	chief, ruler, emperor, he who speaks well
Centéotl	goddess of the Earth and corn	toltecatl	master artisan, artist
chinampa	floating garden in Tezcoco Lake	Tonantzin	"ur mother"; earth goddess (aka Guadalupe)
chocolatl	chocolate	tonatiuh	sun (Aztec nickname for Pedro de Alvarado)
Coatlicue	goddess of flowers	Uitzilopochtili	Huitzilopochtli, god of war
coyotl	coyote	xochitl	flower, rose

Note: a náhuatl is a word in the Aztec language (Náhuatl) that referred to a trained religious practitioner in the pre-Conquest period, and the word is still used today for native shamans who carry on a modern version of the Aztec religion or similar religions. The word is related to a similar word, nahual or nagual (pronounced the same way with a [w]; plural, nahualli). The latter word, nahual, refers to a prominent person in a many Mesoamerican religions who was capable of turning himself into an animal, such as the god-like jaguar. Since each day of the religious or spiritual calendar was associated with its own totemic animal, then a person’s nahual was also the animal for that particular day. An example of a nahual is the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca, who day was the jaguar, and who, therefore, was the god protector of nahualismo / nahualism. The region in which nahualism was (is?) prominent is most of Mesoamerica from NW of present-day Mexico City to Honduras.

VI. Quechua:

Quechua (Sp: quechua; Quechua: Runa Simi) was the language of the Inca people and the Inca empire before the Spanish conquest, and classical Quechua was the principal language used throughout the Inca empire for about 100 years before the Spanish conquest in the first third of the sixteenth century. It is a language still spoken in the Andean mountains centered around Peru and extending from southern Colombia through the Andean regions of Chile and Argentina. According to moderately accurate census estimates in 2007 there are about 7,410,000 speakers of the three main branches of the Quechua language in seven South American countries. Contemporary Quechua has, of course, many loan words from Spanish, while a number of Quechua words are now in standard English including coca, cocaine, guano, jerky, llama, pampa, and quinine. One of the most famous of all Quechua words is soroche (> suruqch'i), which is Spanish for elevation sickness. In its phonetic system Quechua has three vowels and 25 consonants. A distinctive aspect of the consonants is that Quechua has seven velar (k, kh, k') , uvular (q, qh, q'), and glottal (h) consonants, which tend to give Quecha a rather throaty sound. The Inca language was Quechua ( quechua ), a language still spoken in the Andean mountains centered around Peru and extending from southern Colombia through the Andean regions of Chile and Argentina. According to moderately accurate census estimates in 2007 there are about 7,410,000 speakers of the three main branches of the Quechua language in seven South American countries. Contemporary Quechua has, of course, many loan words from Spanish, while a number of Quechua words are now in standard English including coca, cocaine, guano, jerky, llama, pampa, and quinine. One of the most famous of all Quechua words is soroche (> suruqch'i), which is Spanish for elevation sickness. From the Spanish conquest until 1975, Quechua was written according to Spanish spelling norms. However, a new spelling system was adopted in Peru in 1975, which was closer to Quecha itself than Spanish. According to this system, for example, "w" is used for the Spanish "hua" sound and "k" is distinguished from "q". In 1985, Peru adopted the three-vowel system of Quechua rather than the Spanish five-vowel system, which had been used before. Hence, the Inca emperor Huayna Cápac is written as Wayna Qapaq. Here are a few more notable features of Quechua:

• "-kuna" is added to second person and third person pronouns to make their corresponding plural forms.
• In general "-ñiqin" is added to cardinal numbers to form ordinal numbers.
• Adverbs are formed by adding "-ta" or "-lla" to adjectives.
• The verb tenses are past, present, future, and pluperfect.
• Quechua sentences are marked by "evidential suffixes" indicating personal knowledge, hearsay knowledge, or probability.

Addendum:

There were about a two thousand other languages spoken throughout what is now Latin America before the sixteenth century. Parallelling the several reduction of biodiversity around the globe over the past 500 years, the number of languages spoken by non-Conquest peoples (i.e., indigenous, "native" Americans) in the region of Latin America (excluding Anglo North American regions) now stands at about 500, many spoken by so few people that those languages will cease to be native languages during this course of this century.