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The distinction between related languages and dialects is notoriously vague in Mesoamerica. The dominant Mesoamerican socio-cultural pattern through millennia has been centered around the town or city as the highest level community rather than the nation, realm or people.
In 1996, Guatemala formally recognized 21 Mayan languages by name, and Mexico recognizes eight more. The Mayan language family is one of the best documented and most studied in the Americas. Modern Mayan languages descend from Proto-Mayan, a language thought to have been spoken at least 4,000 years ago; it has been partially reconstructed using ...
In the late 20th century, epigraphical evidence has suggested the possibility that other Mesoamerican languages were borrowing vocabulary from Proto-Nahuan much earlier than previously thought. [49] In Mesoamerica the Mayan, Oto-Manguean and Mixe–Zoque languages had coexisted for millennia. This had given rise to the Mesoamerican language area.
Indigenous languages of the Americas (or Amerindian languages) are spoken by Indigenous peoples from the southern tip of South America to Alaska and Greenland, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These Indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language isolates and unclassified ...
The legacy of Mesoamerica: history and culture of a Native American civilization. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-337445-9. Carrasco, David, ed. (2001). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Culture (3 vols. ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510815-9. Wauchope, Robert, ed. (1964–76). Handbook of Middle American Indians (16 vols. ed ...
Classical Nahuatl was a lingua franca in Central Mexico before the Spanish conquest due to Aztec hegemony, [44] and its role was not only preserved but expanded in the initial stage of colonial rule, encouraged by the Spaniards as a literary language and tool to convert diverse Mesoamerican peoples.
The similarities noted between many of the languages of Mesoamerica have led linguistic scholars to propose the constitution of a sprachbund, from as early as 1959. [1] The proposal was not consolidated until 1986, however, when Lyle Campbell, Terrence Kaufman and Thomas Smith-Stark employed a rigid linguistic analysis to demonstrate that the similarities between a number of languages were ...
Mesoamerica and its cultural areas. Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area that begins in the southern part of North America and extends to the Pacific coast of Central America, thus comprising the lands of central and southern Mexico, all of Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, and parts of Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.