Tarahumara language

 

Tarahumara
Rarámuri
Spoken in	Chihuahua, Mexico
Total speakers	~70,000 (All varieties)
Language family	American  Uto-aztecan   Taracahita    Tarahumara
Official status
Official language in	One of 63 national languages of Mexico [1]
Regulated by	Secretaría de Educación Pública
Language codes
ISO 639-1	None
ISO 639-2	nai
ISO 639-3	tar
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

The Tarahumara language is a Mexican indigenous language of the Uto-Aztecan language family spoken by around 70,000 Tarahumara people in the state of Chihuahua.

Contents 1 Varieties 2 Tarahumara Language Ecology 2.1 Foot-runners 2.2 Role in society 2.3 Language shift and health 3 Genetic affiliation 4 Orthography 5 Phonology 6 Morphology 7 Syntax 8 Media 9 References

Varieties

The ethnologue counts 5 varieties of Tarahumara:

Name	ISO-code	Location	Speakers
Central Tarahumara	tar	Southwestern Chihuahua.	55,000. 10,000 monolinguals.
Lowland Tarahumara	tac	Chihuahua.	15,000
Northern Tarahumara	thh	Chihuahua, towns of Santa Rosa Ariseachi, Agua Caliente Ariseachi, Bilaguchi, Tomochi, La Nopalera.	300
Southeastern Tarahumara	tcu	Chinatú, Chihuahua.	No estimate
Southwestern Tarahumara	twr	Chihuahua, town of Tubare	100 (1983 SIL).

Tarahumara Language Ecology

Tarahumara is spoken by approximately 70,400 or more indigenous Mexicans living in the state of Chihuahua. Though the majority of speakers are concentrated in the southwestern area of the state, there are also smaller pockets of speakers in the southeastern, western, and northern areas of Chihuahua. The landscape of the area is dominated almost entirely by the Sierra Madre Occidental, a mountain range in the western part of Mexico. The largest dialect is Western Tarahumara, with 55,000 speakers, 10,000 of whom are monolinguals.

Foot-runners

Due to the fact that the Tarahumara live in steep canyons and have to navigate daily through narrow footpaths in these canyons, they are outstanding endurance runners. In fact, the name the Tarahumara call themselves, [rarámuri], means "foot-runner". This is a more-than adequate name, since Tarahumara people have often been known to beat the best of American marathon runners by a landslide, even while wearing sandals they wove themselves from fibrous plants.

Role in society

In rural areas, the traditional home of the Tarahumara, children pass the language down to their children, as it is the only language they speak. Similarly, schools in rural areas use Tarahumara, though these schools may be too far from home to attend, even for an experienced long-distance runner. The language is also used in local administration, as well as in the traditional religious practices and local business transactions. Spanish speakers who live near or among the Tarahumara will often use it in commerce as well. Because Tarahumara is being passed on to children, it is spoken by both young and old, and there is a positive feeling among the community towards the language.

Language shift and health

At the same time, Spanish is becoming ever more prevalent in indigenous communities, and of the 55,000 speakers of Western Tarahumara, only 10,000 are monolinguals; the rest speak Spanish as a second language, with varying degrees of ability. Because of this, it seems that there is a situation of language shift occurring, though perhaps more slowly than in other areas of native displacement. In any case, it is encouraging that older speakers are still passing on their native language, a sign that language death is not in the near future for Tarahumara.

Genetic affiliation

Tarahumara is widely accepted as a branch of Yuta-Nawan (which is sometimes called Uto-Aztecan). More specifically, it is a Southern Yuta-Nawan and Tarahumaran language. The Tarahumaran language family includes all dialects of Tarahumara, as well as Guajiro, which is another language spoken in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range. Family ties for the grouping are strong, given that Yuta-Nawan languages share many phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and even pragmatic properties. The only controversial linguistic grouping of the Tarahumara language is in the Amerindian language family, posited by Greenberg (1987).

Orthography

Before the arrival of the Spanish, the Tarahumara did not have a writing system to call their own, given that they did not have such a stratified society as other peoples living in Mexico, for example, the Maya. Once the Spanish arrived, a variation of the Spanish orthography was modified to accommodate most of the sounds of Tarahumara, as was done for virtually all of the native populations that the Spanish encountered in the Americas. Also like other Spanish scripts used for American Indian languages, the Tarahumara script was not accurately developed to be faithful to the actual spoken language. However, people are still able to read and write in their native Tarahumara language. Sadly, only 1% of the population is able to do so; 20% of the Tarahumara people can read and write in Spanish.

Phonology

Tarahumara has five phonemic vowels, /a, e, i, o, u/. Additionally, [ə] is an allophone of /a/ word-initially and between a [+high] stressed vowel and the glottal stop.

In terms of consonants, Tarahumara utilizes plosives, fricatives, affricates, nasals, and approximants. Plosives occur in the bilabial, alveolar, velar, and glottal places of articulation, with a voiceless affricate in the alveolar place of articulation. Phonemically, all plosives are voiceless.

Tarahumara has four phonemic fricatives, two voiced and two voiceless. The voiceless fricatives are located at the alveolar and glottal places of articulation, and the voiced fricatives are in the bilabial and velar places of articulation. These two voiced fricatives each have an allophone: [b], and [g], respectively. While it seems more likely that [b] would be an allophone of /p/ and [g] and allophone of /k/, this is not the case.

There are six sonorant consonants: two nasals, /m/ and /n/, as well as four approximants, /w, j, l, r/. The phoneme /r/ has two allophones: a trilled and a forward-flapped variation. Both allophones occur phrase-initially, but the trilled allophone is much more common.

	labial		alveolar		palatal		velar		glottal
plosive	p		t				k		ʔ
affricate			t͡ʃ
fricative	β		s				ɣ		h
approximant	w		l, r		j
nasal	m		n

It should also be noted:

• The affricate /t͡s/ is usually written also as <c>.
• The phoneme /j/ is practically always written as <y>.
• The phoneme /ʔ/ is sometimes written as <ʼ>.

Some important phonological rules:

1. In phrase-initial syllables, unstressed vowels acquire length. This is "bled" by any immediately following vowels, as well as [h, ʔ].
2. Stressed phrase- and word-final vowels can choose whether to acquire voiceless offglides. Word-final vowels, however, only receive offglides when proceeding a stressed syllable-initial plosive or affricate.
3. Word-initially, [a] → [ə] if between a stressed [+high] vowel and [ʔ].
4. In unstressed, word-medial or –final syllables, [i] becomes allophonically less tense.
5. In fast speech, vowels in unstressed syllables are frequently dropped.
6. In unstressed, word-medial or –final syllables, all vowels are dropped when following a nasal and preceding a plosive.

Morphology

Affixes are almost always realized as suffixes, and clitics come word-finally, as well. Nouns and verbs are semi-agglutinating. Words and phrases are head-initial. Adpositions can be prepositions or postpositions, and some are suffixed to nouns.

Focusing on the morphology of nouns first, there is nominative-accusative in subjects and objects. Objects are marked with the suffix [-ʔʧi]; this applies to both direct and indirect objects. In addition to nominative-accusative markings, there are also absolutive suffixes on nouns, which indicate that it is not owned. Such suffixes can take the form [-ʔʧi] as well, and sometimes [-ri] is used instead. When other suffixes are added to a word, the absolutive suffixes are dropped. This absolutive formation is not foreign to the Yuta-Nawan language family; for example, in Nawa, the absolutive suffix [-͡tɬ] or [-͡tɬi] is also used to mark non-possessed forms.

Possessed nouns are marked in several different ways: verbal constructions, noun suffixing, or a combination of the two. In terms of noun suffixing, possessives are marked with [-ra].

Tarahumara plurals are not consistently marked in the same way: sometimes, plural nouns can be recognized for their multiplicity by phonological mutations or additions. However, in other cases, plural nouns are inflectionally the same as singular nouns, though plurality will be shown in other ways: quantity words will be added to the noun phrase; or words related to the head will be inflected for plurality.

Given that Tarahumara is head-final, demonstratives come before the noun, and mark for proximity/distance but not number. They can be used as both articles and pronouns, and can also be doubled. Storytellers will sometimes omit demonstratives in front of names of animals, showing that the animal is being ranked higher on the animacy scale and/or the animal name is being used as a proper noun.

There are several verbal suffixes for both the future and past tenses, with allomorphs of all three of the future tense suffix markers . The imperfect, conditional, passive voice, plural and singular imperative, and past participle are all marked for with suffixes as well. Interestingly, there are several suffixes that indicate different types of gerunds: past, singular, and plural.

Subject can be marked for in one of two ways. A pronoun coming before the verb can mark for 1, 2, 3 person singular and plural. Additionally, a suffix coming after the TAM marker can mark for the subject as well. In this way, subject-marking is more flexible than marking for tense, aspect, and mood; however, subject pronouns cannot be used in conjunction with subject suffixes.

There are multiple suffixes that can change nouns to verbs. These suffixes cover a range of meanings, from "become" or "make" to "put on", "take off", and "have". In a similar suffix-adding process, adjectives can also become verbs. In fact, verbs can also take on suffixes to become other verbs, though noun to verb constructions are the most productive of these types of transformations.

Tarahumara utilizes valence-changing processes that will most often transitivize verbs. Like other features of the language, this is commonly found in Yuta-Nawan languages. To transitivize a verb, it is similarly necessary to substitute the final vowel of the verb root. The process of applicitivization involves a suffix and prefix, as well a change in voicing for the root-initial bilabial consonant. This process goes both ways: if a bilabial is [+voi], it will become [-voi] with the addition of these affixes, and vice versa.

Syntax

Tarahumara syntactic structure is fairly free, but it does, of course, have a least marked form. Like other Yuta-Nawan languages, its default word order is SOV. If there are indirect objects, temporal makers, or locative markers, these typically come after the verb. In any case, the least marked syntax is not always found, as there are many exceptions.

Focus is often used in Tarahumara, as well as topicalization. This means that the syntax often has to be relatively flexible. In order to topicalize an element in a sentence, it is only necessary to place it at the beginning of the sentence. Thus, almost any word order is possible: SVO to emphasize subject, OVS to emphasize object, VSO to emphasize verb, and VOS to emphasize verb (only used with additional emphatic words to indicate subject). It is also interesting to note that the OVS construction is the most prevalent in narratives.

Aside from diverging from the standard syntax, there are other ways to highlight topics in a Tarahumara sentence. The emphatic particle [-ka] can be added to the subject of a sentence to mark it for added importance . The emphatic particle [-ʔe] can be added to nouns in general, and the suffix [-ri] is used as an intensifier on nouns and verbs. To emphasize adverbs, a prefix is added, [ʔ-]. In order to emphasize pronouns, they can be repeated twice over the course of a given sentence. In order to add extra emphasis to a word that already has emphatic particles, the suffix particle allomorphs [-ba], [-pa] can be added.

Tarahumara questions have the following constructions. Yes-no questions are marked with the sentence-initial question particle [-ta], which can sometimes be accompanied by rising intonation on the final syllable . Following the opposite pattern, those that are called WH questions in English are marked with a level or falling prosodic pitch on the last syllable. Additionally, the question words themselves are necessary for a grammatical question, and occur sentence-initially. These words also share a similar phonetic characteristic in that they all contain the allomorph prefixes [͡tʃi-] or [͡tʃe-], with the exception of [kóe], "where", which, as you can see, contains the same affix, only as a suffix instead of a prefix.

To form a relative clause in Tarahumara, speakers need only place a suffix, [-ame] on the verb of the relative clause in order to achieve grammaticality. Relative clauses can come before or after a head, with the difference only being in emphasis. Sometimes, heads to which relative clauses refer can be repeated. In such instances, the head will occur directly before and directly after the relative clause that belongs to it. There also exists a construction that masks itself as a relative clause, but is really a repetition of the subject of the sentence. Often, the second repetition of the subject will be amplified or expounded upon in some way. This syntactic style is not unique to Tarahumara, but rather, it can be found in many other Yuta-Nawan languages, notably Nawa.

Media

Tarahumara-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio station XETAR, broadcasting from Guachochi, Chihuahua.

References

• Burgess, Donald H. (1984) "Western Tarahumara,"‭ Studies in Uto-Aztecan grammar 4: Southern Uto-Aztecan grammatical sketches. Ed. Ronald W. Langacker. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics 56. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington. Pages 1-149.
• Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International
• Gorney, Cynthia. "Tarahumara People." National Geographic November 2008: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/11/tarahumara-people/gorney-text
• Hilton, K. Simon. Diccionario Tarahumara. Tuscon, AX: Instituto Linguistico de Verano, 1993.
• Miller, Wick. (1983). "Uto-Aztecan languages". In W. C. Sturtevant (Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 10, pp. 113-124). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution.
• Zamarron, Jose Luis and Hill, Jane H. Avances y balances de lenguas yutoaztecas. Cordoba: Coleccion Cientifica, 2001.