Misumalpa languages
Misumalpa is a language family in America. It occurs mainly in Central America and comprises four individual languages. Their distribution area extends over El Salvador , Nicaragua and Honduras . The language with the most speakers is Miskito , which is mainly spoken in Nicaragua and has around 140,000 speakers.
A possible relationship with the Chibcha languages is not excluded, but has not yet been proven.
breakdown
- Miskito - about 200,000 speakers, mainly in the Región Autónoma de la Costa Caribe Norte Nicaragua, but also some in Honduras.
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Sumalpan
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Sumo - about 7,000 speakers along the Huaspuc River and its tributaries, mostly in Nicaragua but also in Honduras . Many former speakers now use Miskito. The following varieties can be distinguished:
- Mayangna
- Tawahka
- Panamahka
- Tuahka
- Ulwa
- Mayangna
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Matagalpan :
- Cacaopera - extinct; formerly used in the Morazán department in El Salvador
- Matagalpa - extinct; formerly widespread in the central highlands of Nicaragua and in the department of El Paraíso in Honduras.
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Sumo - about 7,000 speakers along the Huaspuc River and its tributaries, mostly in Nicaragua but also in Honduras . Many former speakers now use Miskito. The following varieties can be distinguished:
history
From the late 16th century, Miskito began to rise to become the predominant language on the Mosquito Coast . The cause was an alliance that the Miskito made with the British Empire. In northeastern Nicaragua, it is still displacing sumo today. In contrast, in southeastern Nicaragua it is becoming less important than Creole, which is based on English . Sumo is at risk in all areas where it is still spoken. However, it is believed that sumo was the predominant language in the region before the rise of the miskito. The Matagalpan languages have long been extinct and are poorly documented.
All Misumalpa languages have the same phonology with the exception of phonotactics . The consonants are p, b, t, d, k, s, h, w, y, and voiced and unvoiced versions of m, n, ng, l, and r; the vowels are long and short versions of a, i, and u.
Web links
- Ulwa language website
- Ken Hale: Website about the Misumalpan family (PDF; 51 kB)
- Ken Hale: Website about the Misumalpan family (PDF; 109 kB)
- David Margolin: Tawahka Language Website (PDF)
- Matagalpa Indigena
- Andrew Koontz-Garbodens' website (with links to texts in Ulwas)
- Indian languages ( Memento from May 27, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
- North and Mesoamerican languages
- Languages of the World - Ethnologue (English)
literature
- Elena Benedicto: Verbal Classifier Systems: The Exceptional Case of Mayangna Auxiliaries. In: Leora Bar-el, Linda Tamburri Watt, Ian Wilson (Eds.): Proceedings of WSCLA VII. The Seventh Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (= University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics. 10, ZDB - ID 2065697-X ). University of British Columbia - Department of Linguistics, Vancouver 2002, pp. 1-14.
- Elena Benedicto, Kenneth Hale: Mayangna, A Sumu Language: Its Variants and Its Status within Misumalpa. In: Elena Benedicto (Ed.): Indigenous Languages (= University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers. 20, ZDB -ID 623010-6 ). University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA 2000, pp. 75-106.
- Colette Craig, Kenneth Hale: A Possible Macro-Chibchan Etymon. In: Anthropological Linguistics. Vol. 34, No. 1/4, 1992, ISSN 0003-5483 , pp. 173-201, JSTOR 30028374 .
- Adolfo Constenla Umaña: Elementos de Fonología Comparada de las Lenguas Misumalpas. In: Revista de Filología y Lingüística de la Universidad de Costa Rica. Vol. 13, No. 1, 1987, ISSN 0377-628X , pp. 129-161, ( online ).
- Adolfo Constenla Umaña: Acerca de la relación genealógica de las lenguas lencas y las lenguas misumalpas. In: Revista de Filología y Lingüística de la Universidad de Costa Rica. Vol. 28, No. 1, 2002, ISSN 0377-628X , pp. 189-205, ( online ).
- Ken Hale: El causativo misumalpa (miskitu, sumu). In: Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca "Julio de Urquijo". Vol. 30, No. 2, 1996, ISSN 0582-6152 , pp. 703-712, ( online ).
- Ken Hale: Misumalpan Verb Sequencing Constructions. In: Claire Lefebvre (Ed.): Serial Verbs. Grammatical, Comparative, and Cognitive Approaches (= Studies in the Sciences of Language Series. 8). John Benjamin, Amsterdam a. a. 1991, ISBN 90-272-2324-6 .
- Ruth Rouvier: Infixation and reduplication in Misumalpan. A reconstruction. Berkeley CA 2002, (Berkeley CA, University of California, BA Thesis, 2002).
- Phil Young, Talmy Givón: The puzzle of Ngäbére auxiliaries: Grammatical reconstruction in Chibchan and Misumalpan. In: William Croft, Suzanne Kemmer, Keith Denning (Eds.): Studies in Typology and Diachrony. Papers presented to Joseph H. Greenberg on his 75th birthday (= Typological Studies in Language. 20). Benjamin, Amsterdam a. a. 1990, ISBN 90-272-2897-3 , pp. 209-243.