Cuitlatec language

Cuitlatec
Spoken in	Mexico
Region	Guerrero
Extinct	1960s, with the death of Juana Can
Language family	Language isolate
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
linguist List	qpb

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

Classification

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

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.

Phonology

Consonants

Cuitlatec consonant phonemes

	Bilabial	Dental	Postalveolar/ Palatal	Velar	Labio-velar	Glottal
Plosive	p b	t d		k ɡ	kʷ	ʔ
Affricate			tʃ
Fricative			ʃ			h
Lateral approximant		l
Lateral fricative		ɬ
Nasal	m	n
Approximant			j		w

• 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.