Opata language
Encyclopedia
Ópata is the name of the Uto-Aztecan
language spoken by the Opata people of northern central Sonora
in Mexico
. It was believed to be dead already in 1930, and Carl Sofus Lumholtz
reported the Opata to have become "Mexicanized" and lost their language and customs already when traveling through Sonora in the 1890s, but in a recent (1993) survey by the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (Now INALI) fifteen people in the Mexican Federal District self identified as speakers of Ópata http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=opt – this may not mean however that the language is actually living, since linguistic nomenclature in Mexico is notoriously fuzzy. And no studies documenting the language spoken by those fifteen persons have been published. If the fifteen persons were in fact speakers of the Uto-Aztecan Ópata language then the language is severely endangered and if not it is probably already extinct. Sometimes Eudeve and Opata are considered distinct languages and sometimes merely dialects of one single language.
s strung together.
Uto-Aztecan languages
Uto-Aztecan or Uto-Aztekan is a Native American language family consisting of over 30 languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found from the Great Basin of the Western United States , through western, central and southern Mexico Uto-Aztecan or Uto-Aztekan is a Native American language family...
language spoken by the Opata people of northern central Sonora
Sonora
Sonora officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Sonora is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 72 municipalities; the capital city is Hermosillo....
in Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
. It was believed to be dead already in 1930, and Carl Sofus Lumholtz
Carl Sofus Lumholtz
Carl Sofus Lumholtz was a Norwegian explorer and ethnographer, best known for his meticulous field research and ethnographic publications on indigenous cultures of Australia and Mesoamerican central Mexico.-Biography:...
reported the Opata to have become "Mexicanized" and lost their language and customs already when traveling through Sonora in the 1890s, but in a recent (1993) survey by the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (Now INALI) fifteen people in the Mexican Federal District self identified as speakers of Ópata http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=opt – this may not mean however that the language is actually living, since linguistic nomenclature in Mexico is notoriously fuzzy. And no studies documenting the language spoken by those fifteen persons have been published. If the fifteen persons were in fact speakers of the Uto-Aztecan Ópata language then the language is severely endangered and if not it is probably already extinct. Sometimes Eudeve and Opata are considered distinct languages and sometimes merely dialects of one single language.
Morphology
Opata is an agglutinative language, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several morphemeMorpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
s strung together.