Totonacan languages

The Totonacan languages are a family of closely related languages spoken by approximately 290,000 Totonac and Tepehua people in the states of Veracruz, Puebla, and Hidalgo in Mexico. At the time of the Spanish conquest Totonacan languages were spoken all along the gulf coast of Mexico.
During the colonial period, Totonacan languages were occasionally written and at least one grammar was produced. In the 20th century the number of speakers of most varieties have dwindled as indigenous identity increasingly became stigmatized encouraging speakers to adopt Spanish as their main language.
The Totonacan languages have only recently been compared to other families on the basis of historical-comparative linguistics, though they share numerous areal features with other languages of the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area, such as the Mayan languages and Nahuatl. Recent work suggests a possible genetic link to the Mixe–Zoque language family, although this has yet to be firmly established.

Internal classification

The family is divided into two branches, Totonac and Tepehua. Of the two, Tepehua is generally considered to consist of three languages—Pisaflores, Huehuetla, and Tlachichilco—while the Totonac branch is considerably more diverse. MacKay divides Totonac into four divisions, based on García Rojas :

Papantla Totonac: spoken in El Escolín, Papantla, Cazones, Tajín, Espinal, and other towns along the Gulf Coast of Veracruz.
North-Central Totonac: spoken roughly between Poza Rica in Veracruz and Mecapalapa, Pantepec, and Xicotepec de Juárez in Puebla.
South-Central Totonac: spoken mostly in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, including the towns of Zapotitlán de Méndez, Coatepec, and Huehuetla in Puebla.
Misantla Totonac: spoken in Yecuatla and other communities outside the city of Misantla.

, Ethnologue recognizes 12 languages in the Totonacan family, three Tepehua languages and nine Totonac. This classification is the basis of the latest version of the ISO language codes for Totonacan, although some of these classifications are disputed.

Language	ISO code	Locations	Number of speakers
Huehuetla Tepehua		Huehuetla, northeast Hidalgo; Mecapalapa, Puebla	3,000
Pisaflores Tepehua		Pisaflores, Hidalgo; Ixhuatlán de Madero, Veracruz	4,000
Tlachichilco Tepehua		Tlachichilco, Veracruz	3,000
Papantla Totonac		Around Papantla, central lowland Veracruz	80,000
Coyutla Totonac		Coyutla, Veracruz	48,000
Highland Totonac		Around Zacatlán, Puebla, and Veracruz	120,000
Filomeno Mata Totonac		The town of Filomeno Mata, highland Veracruz, adjacent to Highland Totonac	15,000
Xicotepec Totonac		In 30 villages around Xicotepec de Juárez in the Sierra Norte de Puebla and Veracruz	3,000
Ozumatlán Totonac		Ozumatlán, Tepetzintla, Tlapehuala and San Agustín in northern Puebla	1,800
Misantla Totonac		Yecuatla and Misantla in southern Veracruz	500
Upper Necaxa Totonac		Patla, Chicontla, Cacahuatlán and San Pedro Tlaloantongo in northeastern Puebla	3,400
Tecpatlán Totonac		Tecpatlán, northeastern Puebla	540

The Mexican Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas recognizes 10 distinct languages or "linguistic variants" in the family, 3 Tepehua and 7 Totonac

Language	population
Western Tepehua	9,200
Northern Tepehua	2,800
Southern Tepehua	1,800
Southeastern Totonac	490
Coastal	58,200
North Central	15,100
South Central	114,900
High Central	8,700
Cerro del Xinolatépetl	1,000
Upper Necaxa	3,300

Coyutla Totonac is grouped with South Central Totonac by INALI while Tecpatlán Totonac is included in the North Central Totonac group. Other recent attempts at classification have suggested that some of these divisions, particularly North Central, Costal, and South Central, and are far too broad and include varieties that might also be classified as separate languages.
A further drawback of the Ethnologue and INALI classifications is the lack of lower-level subgroups beyond the two-way division into Totonac and Tepehua. In the Totonac branch of the family, Misantla is the most distinctive, and the remaining languages form a more closely related group. Divisions amongst the latter group, which might be referred to as "Central Totonac," are unclear, though most researchers agree that there is at least a three-way division between Northern, Southern/Sierra, and Lowland/Coastal varieties. Recent efforts at reconstruction and evidence from lexical similarity further suggest that Southern/Sierra and Lowland group together against Northern, although this is still uncertain, pending more exhaustive investigation. The most recent proposal for the family is as follows:

Tepehua
*Pisaflores
*Huehuetla
*Tlachichilco
Totonac
*Misantla
*Central Totonac
**Northern Totonac
***Upper Necaxa
***Tecpatlán Totonac
***Zihuateutla Totonac
***Cerro Xinolatépetl Totonac
***Apapantilla Totonac
**Lowland–Sierra
***Filomeno Mata
***Lowland Totonac
***Sierra Totonac
****Coatepec
****Coyutla
****Huehuetla Totonac
****Ozelonacaxtla
****Olintla
****Zapotitlán de Méndez

Lexical comparison also suggests that, for Tepehua, Pisaflores and Huehuetla may be more closely related to each other than either is to Tlalchichilco.
MacKay and Trechsel provide the following internal classification:
;Totonac-Tepehua

Totonac
*Sierra Totonac: Zapotitlán, Coatepec, Huehuetla, Caxhuácan, Ozelonacaxtla
*Papantla Totonac: El Escolín, El Tajín, El Carbón, Papantla
*Northern Totonac: Apapantilla, Patla, Chicontla, Cacahuatlán, Filomeno Mata, San Pedro Tlaolantongo
*Misantla Totonac: Yecuatla, San Marcos Atexquilapan, Jilotepec
Tepehua
*Tlachichileo Tepehua: Tlachichileo, Tierra Colorada, Chintipán, Tecomajapa
*Pisaflores Tepehua: Pisaflores, El Tepetate, San Pedro Tziltzacuapan, San José el Salto
*Huehuetla Tepehua: Huehuetla, Barrio Atzlán, Linda Vista, Mecapalapa
Phonology

There is some variation in the sound systems of the different varieties of Totonac and Tepehua, but the following phoneme inventory can be considered a typical Totonacan inventory.

Consonants

This consonant inventory is essentially equivalent to that reconstructed for proto-Totonacan by Arana Osnaya (1953, with the exception of the two back fricatives, and. Most modern languages phonemically have only one of these, but show some allomorphic variation between the two, with one or the other being considered basic. However, Coatepec Totonac is reported to have both phonemes, and more recent reconstructions of the proto-Totonacan consonant inventory have proposed that both were present in that language. The glottal stop is a marginal phoneme in most of the languages and is posited primarily for morphological reasons. The phonological system is fairly typical of Mesoamerica.

Vowels

Most Totonacan languages have a three-vowel system with each quality making distinctions of length and laryngealization. The following is the "typical" Totonacan vocalic inventory.
Tepehua has lost the phonemic laryngealization of vowels and has ejective stops where Totonac has creaky vowels preceded by stops. Some Totonac languages have five-vowel systems, having developed and phonemes, whereas in others and are clearly allomorphs of and, respectively, conditioned by proximity to uvular stops or fricatives.

Grammar

From a typological perspective, the Totonac–Tepehua family presents a fairly consistent profile, and exhibits many features of the Mesoamerican areal type, such as a preference for verb-initial order, head-marking, and extensive use of body part morphemes in metaphorical and locative constructions. The Totonacan languages are highly agglutinative and polysynthetic with nominative/accusative alignment and a flexible constituent order governed by information structure. Syntactic relations between the verb and its arguments are marked by agreement with the subject and one or sometimes two objects. There is no morphological case on nouns and many languages in the family lack prepositions, making use instead of a rich system of causatives, applicatives, and prefixes for body parts and parts of objects. Possession is marked on the possessed noun, the head of the NP. Otherwise, nouns are uninflected, number being an optional category and grammatical gender being absent from the languages. Numerals quantifying nouns bear classificatory prefixes, something that is unusual cross-linguistically as affixal classifiers tend heavily to be suffixes. Totonacan languages are also known for their use of sound symbolism.

Causatives and applicatives

Totonacan languages have a wide assortment of morphemes for increasing the valency of a verb.

Causatives

All Totonacan languages have at least one causative morpheme, a prefix ma:-:
In many of the languages, the causative prefix is regularly or obligatorily associated with a suffix:
In some languages like Upper Necaxa, the suffix is analyzed as part of the causative morpheme, but in others it is treated as a separate transitivizer.