Cuitlatec language

Not to be confused with the Cuicatec language.

Cuitlatec, or Cuitlateco, is an extinct language of Mexico, formerly spoken by an indigenous people known as Cuitlatec.

Cuitlatec
Cuitlateco
Native to	Mexico
Region	Guerrero
Ethnicity	Cuitlatec people
Extinct	1960s, with the death of Juana Can
Language family	Language isolate
Language codes
ISO 639-3	cuy
Linguist List	qpb
Glottolog	cuit1236
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Classification

Cuitlatec has not been convincingly classified as belonging to any language family. It is believed to be a language isolate. In their controversial classification of the indigenous languages of the Americas, Greenberg and Ruhlen include Cuitlatec in an expanded Chibchan language family (Macro-Chibchan), along with a variety of other Mesoamerican and South American languages.^[1] Escalante Hernández suggests a possible relation to the Uto-Aztecan languages.^[2]

Geographic distribution

Cuitlatec was spoken in the state of Guerrero. By the 1930s, Cuitlatec was spoken only in San Miguel Totolapan. The last speaker of the language, Juana Can, is believed to have died in the 1960s.^[2] In 1979, only two elderly women, Florentina Celso and Apolonia Robles, were able to remember about fifty words of the language.^[3]

Phonology

Consonants

Cuitlatec consonant phonemes

	Labial	Dental	Palatal	Velar	Labio-velar	Glottal
Plosive	p b	t d	tʃ	k ɡ	kʷ	ʔ
Fricative		ɬ	ʃ			h
Approximant		l	j		w
Nasal	m	n

• The sounds /f/, /s/, /r/, and /ɾ/ are found in loan words from Spanish.

Vowels

Cuitlatec vowel phonemes

	Front	Central	Back
High	i	ɨ	u
Low	e	a	o

Grammar

Sentences generally follow SVO word order. Adjectives precede the nouns they modify.