The Huave Language

In virtually every region or country of the world at the beginning of the 21^st century, the linguistic minorities were evident. These occurred both through immigration and adoption. Although the linguistic minorities has led to cases of language loss and reduction of language diversity, language contact is part of the social fabric of the daily life of millions of people all over the world. This paper discusses the Huave language, its phonology and morphology in relation to its effects on the cultural behavior of the Huave speakers.

Huave is a genetically isolated language that is spoken in the four variants by approximately 14,000 persons settled in the south eastern part of the state of Oaxaca, between the mouth of the Tehuantepec River and the border of the state of Chiapas (Wetzels & Sluyters 421). The Sociolinguistic background of the Huave language is based in the four towns of Zona Huave which are located along the Pacific Coast of the Oaxaca’s Isthmus or simply, Istmo region close to the cities of Juchitán and Salina Cruz, on three peninsulas that stretch into the Gulf of Tehuantepec. The Huaves therefore occupy a maritime zone, surrounded on land entirely by Spanish and Isthmus Zapotec-speaking areas, with much inter-village contact traditionally taking place over the water.

            Huaves are primarily fishermen, although the future of the traditional livelihood and societal structure currently hangs in the balance as recent, rapid changes associated with globalization and modernization continue to develop and play themselves out. The division of Huave into four dialects probably does not date further back than the 16th century, to the establishment of the towns’ post-Conquest following demographic upheaval caused by wars and epidemics. This gives the dialects a time depth of less than 500 years with fairly consistent contact, so they have enough similarities with each other that much of what we may eventually know about the history of the Huave language will result from internal rather than comparative reconstruction (Wetzels & Sluyters 437). Nevertheless, judging from the reports of San Francisco del Mar speakers, reliable mutual intelligibility with San Mateo del Mar requires significant exposure. The main comprehension difficulties are introduced by vowel shifts, vocabulary differences, and prosodic differences. The difference is perhaps comparable to that between standard spoken Swedish and standard spoken Danish.

The San Dionisio del Mar dialect is most similar to San Mateo, while the Santa María del Mar dialect bears the most affinities to San Francisco; although its geographical proximity to San Mateo has resulted in influence from that dialect as well. In pre-colonial times, the Huaves had contact with Mixes, Zoques, Mixtecs, and other ethnic groups moving through the Isthmus region. In colonial and more recent times, the Zapotec presence has been increasingly significant. While Isthmus Zapotec is widely spoken in the region, only a couple of the San Francisco del Mar Huave speakers can speak more than basic Zapotec. It is possible that there was more Huave-Zapotec bilingualism in previous generations, as Zapotec is also on the retreat in the towns closest to San Francisco del Mar; despite its continued strong presence in the city of Juchitán (Wetzels & Sluyters 451).

The 2000 census gives the following population statistics for the Huave municipios: 9,230 residents in San Mateo del Mar, 5,001 in San Francisco del Mar, and 4,325 in San Dionisio del Mar. The pueblo of Santa María del Mar belongs administratively to Juchitán and has fewer than 1,000 residents. In San Mateo del Mar, the Huave language is spoken actively in everyday life by all generations (Wetzels & Sluyters 401). In San Dionisio del Mar, many adults are bilingual in Huave and Spanish, though younger adults tend to be Spanish-dominant and youth and teenagers seem to have more passive than active competence in the language. The situation in Santa María del Mar is unknown to me, but anecdotal sources indicate that the language there is more endangered than in San Dionisio, and very probably much more so (Wetzels & Sluyters 411). The San Francisco del Mar dialect is severely endangered; Spanish is the language of public and most private life in town.

The monolingual Huave speakers cannot be found at all, and all Huave-dominant bilinguals are well over 60 years of age. According to speakers, who are adolescents, transmission begins to cease in the early 1930s with the arrival of schoolteachers who instruct parents to speak only Spanish with their children and hit children as punishment for speaking Huave (Wetzels & Sluyters 421). Some children from this era remained monolingual or heavily Huave dominant into early adulthood, but as Spanish gained more of a foothold in town, they all ended up using significant amounts of Spanish in daily life, even depending on their life circumstances, to the near-exclusion of Huave. Thus people born as early as 1925 are often Spanish-dominant, and many who grew up speaking Huave have not used it in years, for instance since their parents passed away, especially if their spouses are not also fluent (Wetzels & Sluyters 411).

As for younger residents, many currently over 40 have varying degrees of passive knowledge of Huave: some understand very well, having grown up around parents and older relatives who spoke Huave with each other, while others grew up in entirely Spanish-speaking households and may only recognize a few words of Huave. Very few residents under the age of 40 know more than a few words of Huave, although there is some interest in learning (Wetzels & Sluyters 427). A handful of younger people have managed to attain some conversational competence by apprenticing themselves to elders, and a group of young cultural preservation activists recently compiled and printed a phrasebook for distribution in the community. Because of these varying degrees and types of competence it is hard to estimate a number of “speakers,” but the number of reasonably fluent speakers can hardly be more than 100 (Wetzels & Sluyters 421). In 1940 the population was counted as 1,622, so the subset of that population that were children at the time, not all of whom are still alive would form an approximate upper limit on the number of speakers of all levels of active competence (Wetzels & Sluyters 431).

In their own language, the Huaves self-designate using the inclusive ‘we’ of their respective dialects: kunajts in San Francisco and ikoots in San Mateo, for example, and in Spanish they call themselves mareños. The term huaves is also used but some people disperse it. The word huave is widely reported to come from a Zapotec term meaning ‘people who rot in the humidity.’ Their name for their language translates to ‘our mouth’: umbeyajts in San Francisco and ombeayiiüts in San Mateo. In Spanish they refer to their language sometimes as huave, but more often as simply idioma or dialect (Steriade & Donca 279).

Typological characteristics of San Francisco del Mar Huave The basic word orders in Huave are VOS and SVO, with many of the constituent orders that typically accompany VO order: ad positions preceding nouns prepositions, possessed nouns preceding possessors in noun phrases, nouns preceding relative clauses, and sentence-initial question words; on the other hand, modifying adjectives precede head nouns. Single arguments of verbs can either precede or follow the verb, and left-adjunction topicalization of arguments is common (Wetzels & Sluyters 421).

Huave can be considered a head-marking language. Argument structure is indexed on the verb, possession is marked on head nouns in noun phrases, and plurality is marked on determiners rather than nouns in determiner phrases. Huave uses both prefixes and suffixes, along with some rather unique “mobile affixes” that surface as either prefixes or suffixes depending on the phonological context (Wetzels & Sluyters 422).

The main feature of nominal morphology is a division into three noun classes; two closed, one productive, which is associated with different patterns of possessive marking. The San Francisco del Mar dialect of Huave has no case system, but there is a rich system of determiner particles. Aside from the aforementioned person-number marking, the verbal system is characterized by bound roots that can be marked for three morphologically simple tenses aspects; atemporal, completive, stative, two non-finite categories, subordinate and gerundive, and various complex tenses-aspects that are built either exclusively on the subordinate, future, durative or in a transitivity-dependent way on either the subordinate or the atemporal; progressive, perfect (Steriade & Donca 279). While transitives are distinguished from intransitives in this last group of tenses-aspects, there is split intransitivity elsewhere in the verbal system: transitive and unergative verbs are united under the category of “prefixing” roots, with unaccusatives forming a separate group of “suffixing” roots. Most derivational morphology revolves around valence alternations one way or another; for example, there are at least five productive and nonproductive morphological strategies for passivization impersonalization (Steriade & Donca 270).

            A few words can be said about typological characteristics of San Francisco del Mar phonology. As in the San Mateo del Mar dialect, the basic distinction in the consonant inventory is between the plain and palatalized consonant series, with contrastive palatalization only morpheme-finally, and surface diphthongization processes cue the plain vs. palatalized status of final consonants. Unlike the San Mateo del Mar dialect, there is no lexical tone or robust vowel length distinction, and there are five vowel phonemes as opposed to San Mateo’s underlying six. The San Mateo vowel length distinction corresponds to San Francisco vowel aspiration. Diphthongization and vowel harmony exist in both dialects, although the actual patterns are somewhat different (Wetzels & Sluyters 421).

Some unique patterns of copy and blocking in Huave vowel harmony have not been attested in other languages, although they have formal parallels in reduplication. The Huave pattern supports a string-internal correspondence approach to long-distance phonological interactions, as opposed to traditional auto segmental spreading (Steriade & Donca 289). The San Francisco dialect has a range of typologically unusual processes relating to vowel aspiration that are not found in San Mateo, due to the latter dialect’s lack of contrastive aspiration. These include fusion with adjacent glides to create derived voiceless fricatives, dissimilatory deletion of aspiration following a +spread glottis segment anywhere in a preceding syllable-length window a sort of reverse Grassmann’s Law, variable weakening/deletion apparently conditioned by metrical and segmental context, and deletion before voiced codas (Steriade & Donca 279). Another unique feature of San Francisco phonology is the deletion of various word-final segments and subsegments, not all of which are deleted in San Mateo: the stop phase of prenasalized stops, consonants after aspirated vowels, and glides homorganic with their preceding vowel.

As for morphology, while there are numerous small differences in both structure and substance between the San Francisco del Mar and San Mateo del Mar dialects, the basic outlines at the level discussed in this typological-overview section are very similar (Steriade & Donca 290). Some of the more significant differences are San Francisco’s loss of the dual/plural distinction in the first-person inclusive, its entirely different future prefixes San Mateo ap- used in non-first person only vs. San Francisco i- used in all persons, the apparent absence of the San Francisco gerund category in San Mateo, and the absence of some San Mateo affixes in San Francisco such as the dubitative ko- and augmentative an (ka)-.  Other differences have to do with the re-analyses of categories that are common to both dialects, which could potentially also apply to the San Mateo dialect. For example, their past tense is my completive aspect; their future tense is called by the same name here but additional properties are pointed out; and their “recent past” tense is what I refer to as perfect aspect (Steriade & Donca 279).

Much research on the tense/aspect system remains to be done, but the problematization of the categories is hoped to represent at least a start. I also do not have anything corresponding to their category of participles, since at least in San Francisco all such forms appear to represent specific syntactic uses of independently attested verb forms, rather than a separate morphosyntactic category. The prior existence of the descriptive work by Stairs & Hollenbach has provided an advantaged starting point for research on the San Franciscco del Mar dialect, permitting this paper’s going somewhat beyond description into more detailed analysis than what would otherwise be possible of various morphological topics. Perhaps the most significant novel morphological result in this paper is a relatively comprehensive picture of affix order, which is argued to have both morphological and phonological components.

Previously, there has been virtually no work on the relative hierarchical position of any of the Huave affixes; this is perhaps due to the fact that affix mobility, where affixes can occupy different linear positions in different words, complicates the issue (Steriade & Donca 299). The proposed hierarchical layer model integrates mobile affixes into a general ordering schema for all verbal affixes for which there is ordering evidence, capturing the fact that mobile affixes surface at a consistent distance from the root relative to other affixes regardless of whether they are prefixes or suffixes. The prefixal vs. suffixal linear position of a mobile affix in any given instance is then conditioned by phonology, an analysis that takes (Noyer 198) as a starting point. In sum, the unique morphological and phonological characteristics of Huave in general – and the San Francisco del Mar dialect in particular – mean that further study of these understudied language varieties, as with the understudied languages in general should, aside from having inherent documentary value, have much to contribute to the cross-linguistic research.

Work cited

Steriade, Donca. 1995. Underspecification and markedness. In J. Goldsmith, ed., The Handbook             of Phonological Theory, 114-175. Oxford: Blackwell.

Suarez, Jorge. 1975. Estudios huaves. Colección Científica Lingüística 22. Mexico City: Instituto             Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

Wetzels, L. & W. Sluyters. 1995. Formação de raiz, formação de glide e ‘decrowding’ fonético     em Maxacalí. Estudos fonológicos das línguas indígenas brasileiras, 103-149. Rio de        Janeiro: Editora UFRJ.