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Uto-Aztecan or Uto-Aztekan is a Native American language family consisting of over 30 languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The name of the language family was created to show that it includes both the Ute language of Utah and the Aztecan languages of Mexico. The Uto-Aztecan language family is among the largest linguistic family in the Americas in terms of speakers, in geographic extension and in the number of languages. The northernmost Uto-Aztecan language is Shoshoni, spoken as far north as Salmon, Idaho, while the southernmost is the Pipil language of El Salvador. ''Ethnologue'' gives the total number of languages in the family as 61, and the total number of speakers as 1,900,412. The million-and-a-half speakers of Nahuatl languages account for almost four-fifths (78.9%) of these. The internal classification of the family often divides the family into two branches: a northern branch including all the languages of the US and a Southern branch including all the languages of Mexico, although it is still being discussed whether this is best understood as a genetic classification or as a geographical one. Below this level of classification the main branches are well accepted: Numic (including languages such as Comanche and Shoshoni) and the Californian languages (formerly known as the Takic group) including Cahuilla and Luiseño, account for most of the Northern languages except for Hopi and Tübatulabal. The Southern languages are divided into the Tepiman (including O'odham and Tepehuán), the Tarahumaran languages including Raramuri and Guarijio language, the Cahitan languages (Yaqui and Mayo language), Corachol (including Cora and Huichol) and Nahuan languages. The homeland of the Uto-Aztecan languages is generally considered to have been in the American South-West or possibly North-Western Mexico – although there is some discussion about the possibility that the language family originated in southern Mexico, within the Mesoamerican language area. ==Proto-language and Uto-Aztecan homeland== The Proto-Uto-Aztecan language is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Uto-Aztecan languages. Authorities on the history of the language group have usually placed the Proto-Uto-Aztecan homeland in the border region between the United States and Mexico, namely the upland regions of Arizona and New Mexico and the adjacent areas of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuaua, roughly corresponding to the Sonoran Desert and the western part of the Chihuahuan Desert. The proto-language would have been spoken by Mesolithic foragers in Aridoamerica, about 5,000 years ago. The homeland of the Numic languages has been placed in Southern California near Death Valley, and the homeland of the proposed Southern Uto-Aztecan group has been placed on the coast of Sonora. A contrary proposal, that suggests the homeland of Proto-Uto-Aztecan to have been much further to the south, was published in 2001 by Jane H. Hill, based on her reconstruction of maize-related vocabulary in Proto-Uto-Aztecan. By her theory, the assumed speakers of Proto-Uto-Aztecan were maize cultivators in Mesoamerica, who gradually moved north, bringing maize cultivation with them, during the period of roughly 4,500 to 3,000 years ago. The geographic diffusion of speakers corresponded to the breakup of linguistic unity. This hypothesis has been criticized on several grounds, and it is not generally accepted by Uto-Aztecanists. A survey of agriculture-related vocabulary by Merrill (2012) found that the agricultural vocabulary can only be reconstructed for Southern Uto-Aztecan. This supports a conclusion that the Proto-Uto-Aztecan speech community did not practice agriculture, but only adopted it after entering Mesoamerica from the North. 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「Uto-Aztecan languages」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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