20 Facts About Otomi language

The attitude of the larger world toward the Otomi language started to change in 2003 when Otomi was granted recognition as a national language under Mexican law together with 61 other indigenous languages.

From Spanish, the word Otomi language has become entrenched in the linguistic and anthropological literature.

Precolumbian Otomi language people did not have a fully developed writing system.

The Otomi language often translated names of places or rulers into Otomi language rather than using the Nahuatl names.

At the time of the Spanish conquest of central Mexico, Otomi language had a much wider distribution than now, with sizeable Otomi language speaking areas existing in the modern states of Jalisco and Michoacan.

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Text in Classical Otomi language is not readily comprehensible since the Spanish-speaking friars failed to differentiate the varied vowel and consonant phonemes used in Otomi language.

Consequently, a significant number of Otomi language documents exist from the period, both secular and religious, the most well-known of which are the Codices of Huichapan and Jilotepec.

At that time, Otomi lost its status as a language of education, ending Classical Otomi period as a literary language.

Otomi language belongs to the Oto-Pamean branch of the Oto-Manguean languages.

Dialectologists tend to group the languages into three main groups that reflect historical relationships among the dialects: Northwestern Otomi spoken in the Mezquital Valley and surrounding areas of Hidalgo, Queretaro and Northern Mexico State, Southwestern Otomi spoken in the valley of Toluca, and Eastern Otomi spoken in the Highlands of Northern Puebla, Veracruz and Hidalgo, in Tlaxcala and two towns in the Toluca Valley, San Jeronimo Acazulco and Santiago Tilapa.

In Mezquital Otomi language, suffixes are never specified for tone, while in Tenango Otomi language, the only syllables not specified for tone are prepause syllables and the last syllable of polysyllabic words.

Stress in Otomi language is not phonemic but rather falls predictably on every other syllable, with the first syllable of a root always being stressed.

Since the friars who alphabetized the Otomi language populations were Spanish speakers, it was difficult for them to perceive contrasts that were present in Otomi language but absent in Spanish, such as nasalisation, tone, the large vowel inventory as well as aspirated and glottal consonants.

Orthographies used to write modern Otomi language have been a focus of controversy among field linguists for many years.

Practical orthographies used to promote Otomi literacy have been designed and published by the Instituto Linguistico de Verano and later by the national institute for indigenous languages .

Simultaneously, the Otomi language is head-marking in terms of its verbal morphology, and its nominal morphology is more analytic.

Otomi language nouns are marked only for their possessor; plurality is expressed via pronouns and articles.

Classical Otomi language, as described by Carceres, distinguished neutral, honorific, and pejorative definite articles: an, neutral singular; o, honorific singular; nø, pejorative singular; e, neutral and honorific plural; and yo, pejorative plural.

In Toluca Otomi language mba- is the third person singular Imperfect prefix for movement verbs.

Otomi language has the nominative–accusative alignment, but by one analysis there are traces of an emergent active–stative alignment.