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The Mazatecan languages are a group of closely related indigenous languages spoken by some 200,000 people in the area known as La Sierra Mazateca, which is located in the northern part of the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, as well as in adjacent areas of the states of Puebla and Veracruz. The group is often described as a single language called Mazatec, but because several varieties are not mutually intelligible, they are better described as a group of languages.〔Gudschinsky 1958〕 The languages belong to the Popolocan subgroup of the Oto-Manguean language family. Under the "Law of Linguistic Rights" they are recognized as "national languages" along with the other indigenous languages of Mexico and Spanish. The Mazatec language is vigorous in many of the smaller communities of the Mazatec area, and in many towns it is spoken by almost all inhabitants; however, the language is beginning to lose terrain to Spanish in some of the larger communities like Huautla de Jimenez and Jalapa de Díaz. Like other Oto-Manguean languages, the Mazatecan languages are tonal, and tone plays an integral part in distinguishing both lexical items and grammatical categories. The centrality of tone to the Mazatec language is exploited by the system of whistle speech which is employed in most Mazatec communities and which allows speakers of the language to have entire conversations only by whistling. == Classification == The Mazatecan languages are part of the Oto-Manguean language family and belong to the family's Eastern branch. In that branch, they belong to the Popolocan subgroup together with the Popoloca, Ixcatec and Chocho languages. Brinton was the first to propose a classification of the Mazatec languages, which he correctly grouped with the Zapotec and Mixtec languages.〔Brinton 1891〕 In 1892 he second-guessed his own previous classification and suggested that Mazatec was in fact related to Chiapanec-Mangue and Chibcha.〔Brinton 1892〕 Early comparative work by Morris Swadesh, Roberto Weitlaner and Stanley Newman laid the foundations for comparative Oto-Manguean studies, and Weitlaner's student María Teresa Fernandez de Miranda was the first to propose reconstruction of the Popolocan languages which while it cited Mazatec data, nonetheless left Mazatecan out of the reconstruction.〔Fernandez de Miranda 1951〕 Subsequent work by Summer Institute linguist Sarah Gudschinsky gave a full reconstruction first of Proto-Mazatec (Gudschinsky 1956) and then of Proto-Popolocan-Mazatecan (Gudschinsky 1959) (then referred to as Popotecan, a term which didn't catch on). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mazatecan languages」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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