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Mesoamerican languages are the languages indigenous to the Mesoamerican cultural area, which covers southern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. The area is characterized by extensive linguistic diversity containing several hundred different languages and seven major language families. Mesoamerica is also an area of high linguistic diffusion in that long-term interaction among speakers of different languages through several millennia has resulted in the convergence of certain linguistic traits across disparate language families. The Mesoamerican sprachbund is commonly referred to as the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area. The languages of Mesoamerica were also among the first to evolve independent traditions of writing. The oldest texts date to approximately 1000 B.C.E. while most texts in the indigenous scripts (such as Maya) date to ca. 600–900 CE. Following the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, and continuing up until the 19th century, most Mesoamerican languages were written in Latin script. The languages of Mesoamerica belong to 6 major families – Mayan, Oto-Mangue, Mixe–Zoque, Totonacan, Uto-Aztecan and Chibchan languages (only on the southern border of the area) – as well as a few smaller families and isolates – Purépecha (Tarascan), Huave, Tequistlatec and Misumalpan. Among these Oto-Manguean and Mayan families account for the largest numbers of speakers by far – each having speakers numbering more than a million. Many Mesoamerican languages today are either endangered or already extinct, but others, including the Mayan languages, Nahuatl, Mixtec and Zapotec, have several hundred thousand speakers and remain viable. ==Language vs. dialect== The distinction between related languages and dialects is notoriously vague in Mesoamerica. The dominant Mesoamerican socio-cultural pattern through millennia has been centered around the town or city as the highest level community rather than the nation, realm or people. This has meant that within Mesoamerica each city-state or town community, called in Nahuatl an altepetl, has had its own language standard which, in the typical case, has evolved separately from closely related but geographically remote languages. Even geographically close communities with closely related, mutually intelligible languages have not necessarily seen themselves as being ethnically related, or their language as being a unifying factor between them. The relative endogamy of the town community has also resulted in a large linguistic diversification between communities despite geographical and linguistic proximity, often resulting in a low intelligibility between varieties of the same language spoken in adjacent communities. The exception to this rule is when a common “lingua franca” has evolved to facilitate communication between different linguistic groups. This has been the case for Classical Nahuatl and Classical Maya, both of which, at different times in history, have been used as a common language between different ethnic groups. Further complicating matters are the semi-nomadic lifestyle of many Mesoamerican peoples, and political systems which often have used relocation of entire communities as a political tool. Dialect or variant “chaining” is common, where any adjacent two or three towns in a sequence are similar enough in speech to understand each other fairly well, but those separated more widely have trouble understanding each other, and there are no clear breaks naturally separating the continuum into coherent sub-regions.〔Suárez, 1983 p13–20〕 All of these factors together have made it exceedingly difficult to distinguish between what constitutes a language or a dialect in Mesoamerica. Linguistic isoglosses do not coincide often or strongly enough to prove very useful when trying to decide, and sociological factors often further cloud the picture. The significance of measurements of intelligibility (which is itself difficult to measure) depends very much on analysts' purposes and theoretical commitments.〔Suaréz 1983 p16〕 In Spanish the word “''dialecto''” has often been used generically about indigenous languages in order to describe them as inherently inferior to the European languages. In recent years this has caused an aversion to the term “dialect” among Spanish-speaking linguists and others, and the term “''variante''” has often been applied instead.〔(SIL international description of the use of the word "dialecto" in popular speech ) 〕 Many Mesoamerican linguistic groupings have not had different names in common usage for their different languages and some linguistic groups known by a single name show a sufficiently significant variation to warrant division into a number of languages which are quite low in mutual intelligibility. This is the case for example for the Mixtecan, Zapotecan and Nahuan linguistic groups, which all contain distinct languages that are nonetheless referred to by a single name. Sometimes a single name has even been used to describe completely unrelated linguistic groups, as is the case with the terms "Popoluca" or "Chichimeca". This shortage of language names has meant that the convention within Mesoamerican linguistics when writing about a specific linguistic variety is to always mention the name of the broad linguistic group as well as the name of the community, or geographic location in which it is spoken, for example Isthmus-Mecayapan Nahuatl, Zoogocho Zapotec or Usila Chinantec. Some language groups however have been more adequately named. This is the case of the Mayan languages, with an internal diversity that is arguably comparable to that found between the Nahuatl dialects, but many of whose linguistic varieties have separate names, such as K'iche', Tzotzil or Huastec.〔Suárez 1983 p20〕 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「Mesoamerican languages」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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