MESO-AMERICAN INDIAN LANGUAGES

also called Middle American Indian languages group of languages spoken in an area of the aboriginal New World that includes central and southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, parts of Honduras and Nicaragua, and part of northwest Mexico. Though various centres of civilization have flourished in the area, sometimes concurrently, from 1000 BC down to the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1519, Meso-America as a whole has had a more or less common cultural history for 2,500 years. Treatments of the languages of Meso-America are customarily organized on the basis of their genetic relationships, and only secondarily on that of geographical distribution. Thus, some languages treated as Meso-American are not in fact spoken in Meso-America proper but form linguistic families with languages that are spoken there. For information about languages of northeast, north central, and northwest Mexico that are not dealt with in this section, see North American Indian languages. For languages of Central America not treated here, see South American Indian languages. Some 70 Indian languages are spoken today in Meso-America by perhaps 7,500,000 people. When the Spanish conquered Mexico in 1519, there may have been 20,000,000 people in Meso-America. Within 100 years of the conquest, the Indian population had decreased by 80 percent as a result of war, disease, forced labour, and starvation. Since then the Indian population has gone back to a higher level, but several languageshave become extinct. Meso-American languages with the greatest number of speakers in the mid-20th century are: Additional reading Few books have appeared treating the Meso-American Indian languages as a group, although many dictionaries and grammars for individual languages have been prepared. An overview can be gotten from three articles in the Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 5, Linguistics (1967): Maria Teresa Fernandez de Miranda, Inventory of Classificatory Materials, an annotated bibliography; Morris Swadesh, Lexicostatistic Classification, in which the author applies glottochronology to the classification of all the Meso-American Indian languages; and Robert Longacre, Systemic Comparison and Reconstruction, a review of what had been accomplished in the historical-comparative field to that date. For linguistic characteristics of Meso-American languages, see Terrence Kaufman, Areal Linguistics and Middle America, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 11 (1972), pp. 459484. For Uto-Aztecan, see C.F. and F.M. Voegelin and Kenneth L. Hale, Typological and Comparative Grammar of Uto-Aztecan (1962); and Wick R. Miller, Uto-Aztecan Cognate Sets (1967). For Mayan and new languages, see Terrence Kaufman, TecoA New Mayan Language, Int. J. Am. Linguistics, 35:154174 (1969). For external contacts, see Ronald D. Olson, Mayan Affinities with Chipaya of Bolivia, ibid., 30:313324 (1964), and 31:2938 (1965). Terrence Kaufman