The+P'urhépecha+language

**Language**

The Tarascan or P'urhépecha language is spoken today by only a small group of people in the highlands of the Mexican state of Michoacán (est. 100,000 people). The language itself is considered by linguists to be a language isolate, or the natural language of the area with no genealogical relationships with other languages (it does not descend from any other language). It is an agglutinative language which has primarily SVO word order.



In 1980, a movement began among the Language Academy of the P'urhépecha and the Research Center of Culture P'urhépecha for strengthening the language. Today there are over 120,000 people who speak P'urhépecha with over 12,000 being monolingual.

The Language Academy of the P'urhépecha (P'urhe Uandakueri Juramukua) is a civil association which formed in the late 70's to regulate the writing and grammar of the P'urhépecha language. It adopted the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent the sounds that the Latin alphabet was unable to translate, as the explosive //p ', t', r ',// or nasal //rh, th.//

The P'urhépecha language is composed of particles accompanied by words that indicate number, gender and case: //uarichaeri// means "Ladies" of //uari// "lady" //cha// "plural" and //eri// "of". //Uaritsichaeri// means of the two ladies, as //tsi tsimani// is a contract of two. There are no prefixes or suffixes only after the roots, indicating through them the location, direction, appearance, time, person, etc..

Nouns and verbs can be viewed as particles which can be added along with other nominals functioning as modifiers in juxtaposition, as //uatsapi// 'child' which is constructed //Uatsi// 'son' and //sapi//'small'.

Phonology is not very complicated and is similar to the Spanish, although the largest number of phonemes. For example, phonemes are aspirated as p ', t', k '. ch ', ts' (See link below for more information or see Freidrich, "A Phonology of Tarascan" for more in-depth information about phonology).

The official alphabet is the P’URHEPECHA JIMBO KARARAKUECHA (P'urhépecha Alphabet):
//a b ch ch' d e g i ï j k k' m n nh o p p' r rh s t t' ts ts' u x//. Here is an example of someone speaking the Tarascan or P'urhépecha language: (Lesson 1 of the P'urhépecha language)

media type="youtube" key="HX57G-pM-oc" height="315" width="420"

(For more tutorials, see [|Lesson 2], [|Lesson 3], [|Lesson]

Helpful Links
Purépecha Colonial Dictionary: [|Purepecha Dictionary] Link to information above [|The Language Academy of the P'urhépecha] Link to the P'urhépecha Culture home page [|Cultura Purepecha] Link to Vocabulario P'urhépecha [|Purepecha Vocabulary]