All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the family, which is extinct, was spoken as far south as Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
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24 Facts About Oto-Manguean languages
2.
Highest number of speakers of Oto-Manguean languages today are found in the state of Oaxaca where the two largest branches, the Zapotecan and Mixtecan languages, are spoken by almost 1.
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3.
Some Oto-Manguean languages are moribund or highly endangered; for example, Ixcatec and Matlatzinca each has fewer than 250 speakers, most of whom are elderly.
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4.
The internal diversity is comparable with that of Indo-European, and the Proto-Oto-Manguean languages language is estimated to have been spoken some time before 2000 BCE.
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5.
However Oto-Manguean languages stands out from the other language families of Mesoamerica in several features.
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6.
Status of the Amuzgo language as either a part of the Mixtecan group or as forming its own branch from the proto-Oto-Manguean languages node has been discussed by Longacre, who argued for the latter, but the currently most accepted classification by Campbell follows Terrence Kaufman in considering Amuzgo to be a branch of Mixtecan.
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7.
Longacre considered Oto-Manguean to be among the most extensively studied language families of the world, with a level reconstruction rivaling the Indo-European family in completeness, but Kaufman and Justeson reject this, lamenting the rudimentary reconstruction of Proto-Oto-Manguean lexicon and grammar.
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8.
Nevertheless, Brown suggests that Oto-Manguean languages as Sprachbund is a reasonable alternative hypothesis to the proposal of Oto-Manguean languages as a language family.
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9.
Some early classifications such as that by Brinton, considered that Oto-Manguean languages might be related to Chinese, because like Chinese the languages were tonal and mostly monosyllabic.
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10.
Oto-Manguean languages urheimat has been thought to be in the Tehuacan valley in connection with one of the earliest neolithic cultures of Mesoamerica, and although it is in doubt whether Tehuacan was the original home of the Proto-Otomanguean people, it is agreed that the Tehuacan culture were likely Oto-Mangue speakers.
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11.
Long history of the Oto-Manguean languages family has resulted in considerable linguistic diversity between the branches of the family.
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12.
Kaufman proposes that Oto-Manguean languages are an important candidate for being the source of many of the traits that have diffused into the other languages in the Mesoamerican linguistic area.
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13.
The language classification of the SIL International's Ethnologue considers Otomi to be a cover term for nine separate Otomi Oto-Manguean languages and assigns a different ISO code to each of these nine varieties.
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14.
The Mazatecan Oto-Manguean languages are known for their prolific use of whistled speech.
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16.
All Oto-Manguean languages have tone: some have only two level tones while others have up to five level tones.
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17.
Oto-Manguean languages have a wide range of tonal systems, some with as many as 10 tone contrasts and others with only two.
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18.
Some Oto-Manguean languages have a register system only distinguishing tones by the relative pitch.
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19.
In most Oto-Manguean languages tone serves to distinguish both between the meanings of roots and to indicate different grammatical categories.
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20.
Some Oto-Manguean languages have terrace systems where some tones are "upstep" or "downstep", causing a rise or drop in pitch level for the entire tonal register in subsequent syllables.
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21.
Several Oto-Manguean languages have systems of whistled speech, where by whistling the tonal combinations of words and phrases, information can be transmitted over distances without using words.
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22.
Many modern Oto-Manguean languages keep these restrictions in syllable structure but others, most notably the Oto-Pamean languages, now allow both final clusters and long syllable initial clusters.
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23.
Oto-Manguean languages have changed quite a lot from the very spartan phoneme inventory of Proto-Oto-Manguean.
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24.
Many Oto-Manguean languages have rich inventories of both vowels and consonants.
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