A Grammar of Misantla Totonac: Studies in Indigenous Languages of the Americas

Description

The Totonac-Tepehua language family, though typologically similar to some other Mesoamerican languages, has not yet been demonstrated to be related to any other language family. Misantla Totonac is the southernmost variety of Totonac and is spoken in the area between Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz, Mexico and Misantla, Veracruz. In 1974, a newly paved road connected Xalapa and Misantla bringing a relatively isolated area into contact with mainstream Mexican language and culture. Consequently, Misantla Totonac is no longer acquired as a first language by the local children and is rapidly being replaced by Spanish. A GRAMMAR OF MISANTLA TOTONAC presents the phonological structure of the language and the most productive morphological processes. It describes inflection and derivation of all major word classes (verbs, nominals, and statives) in detail. It introduces grammatical agreement and word order phenomena, and presents the most salient and significant aspects of Misantla Totonac grammar. Although various Totonac-Tepehua grammars exist in Spanish, this is the only published grammar of the Totonac-Tepehua language family currently available in English. Winner of the annual Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) Book Award, this marks the third volume to be published in the series. "The material presented here is key to any future work in reconstructing the proto-language. . . .[It] is a significant contribution to both general linguistics as well as to Mesoamerican studies. -James Watters, Summer Institute of Linguistics