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Otomi ( ; ) is an Oto-Pamean language spoken by approximately 240,000 indigenous Otomi people in the Mexican Plateau region of Mexico. Otomi consists of several closely related languages, many of which are not mutually intelligible. The word Hñähñu has been proposed as an endonym, but since it represents the usage of a single dialect, it has not gained wide currency. Linguists have classified the modern dialects into three dialect areas: the Northwestern dialects are spoken in Querétaro, Hidalgo and Guanajuato; the Southwestern dialects are spoken in the State of Mexico; and the Eastern dialects are spoken in the highlands of Veracruz, Puebla, and eastern Hidalgo and villages in Tlaxcala and Mexico states.
Like all other Oto-Manguean languages, Otomi is a tonal language, and most varieties distinguish three tones. Nouns are marked only for possessor; the plural number is marked with a definite article and a verbal suffix, and some dialects keep dual number marking. There is no case marking. Verb morphology is either fusional or agglutinating depending on the analysis.: "Desde un punto de vista de la tipología morfológica clásica greenbergiana el otomí es una lengua fusional que se convertiría, por otro lado en aglutinante si todos los clíticos se reanalizaran como afijos (From the point of view of the classic Greenbergian morphological typologogy, Otomí is a fusional language which would however turn into an agglutinating one if all the clitics were reanalyzed as affixes)" In verb inflection, infixation, consonant mutation, and apocope are prominent processes. The number of irregular verbs is large. A class of cross-references the grammatical subject in a sentence. These morphemes can be analysed as either or and mark tense, aspect and grammatical mood. Verbs are inflected for either direct object or dative object (but not for both simultaneously) by suffixes. Grammar also distinguishes between clusivity.
After the Spanish conquest, Otomi became a written language when friars taught the Otomi to write the language using the Latin script; colonial period's written language is often called Classical Otomi. Several Codex and grammars were composed in Classical Otomi. A negative stereotype of the Otomi promoted by the Nahua peoples and perpetuated by the Spanish resulted in a loss of status for the Otomi, who began to abandon their language in favor of Spanish. The attitude of the larger world toward the Otomi language started to change in 2003 when Otomi was granted recognition as a national language under Mexican law together with 61 other indigenous languages.
The word Otomi entered the Spanish language through Nahuatl and describes the larger Otomi macroethnic group and the dialect continuum. From Spanish, the word Otomi has become entrenched in the linguistic and anthropological literature. Among linguists, the suggestion has been made to change the academic designation from Otomi to Hñähñú, the endonym used by the Otomi of the Mezquital Valley; however, no common endonym exists for all dialects of the language.
The pre-Columbian Otomi people did not have a fully developed writing system. However, Aztec writing, largely ideographic, could be read in Otomi as well as Nahuatl. The Otomi often translated names of places or rulers into Otomi rather than using the Nahuatl names. For example, the Nahuatl place name Tenochtitlān, "place of Opuntia cactus", was rendered as in proto-Otomi, with the same meaning.In most modern varieties of Otomi the name for "Mexico" has changed to (in Ixtenco Otomi) or (in Mezquital Otomi). In some varieties of Highland Otomi it is mbôndo. Only Tilapa Otomi and Acazulco Otomi preserve the original pronunciation (Lastra, 2006:47).
"Classical Otomi" is the term used to define the Otomi spoken in the early centuries of colonial rule. This historical stage of the language was given Latin orthography and documented by Spanish friars who learned it in order to proselytize among the Otomi. Text in Classical Otomi is not readily comprehensible since the Spanish-speaking friars failed to differentiate the varied vowel and consonant used in Otomi. Friars and monks from the Spanish mendicant orders such as the wrote Otomi grammars, the earliest of which is Friar Pedro de Cárceres's Arte de la lengua othomí , written perhaps as early as 1580, but not published until 1907. In 1605, Alonso de Urbano wrote a trilingual Spanish-Nahuatl-Otomi dictionary, which included a small set of grammatical notes about Otomi. The grammarian of Nahuatl, Horacio Carochi, has written a grammar of Otomi, but no copies have survived. He is the author of an anonymous dictionary of Otomi (manuscript 1640). In the latter half of the eighteenth century, an anonymous Jesuit priest wrote the grammar Luces del Otomi (which is, strictly speaking, not a grammar but a report on research about Otomi). Neve y Molina wrote a dictionary and a grammar. cf. in general Zimmermann 1997
During the colonial period, many Otomis learned to read and write their language. Consequently, a significant number of Otomi documents exist from the period, both secular and religious, the most well-known of which are the Codices of Huichapan and Jilotepec.The Huichapan Codex is reproduced and translated in . In the late colonial period and after independence, indigenous groups no longer had separate status. At that time, Otomi lost its status as a language of education, ending Classical Otomi period as a literary language. This led to a declining numbers of speakers of indigenous languages, as Indigenous groups throughout Mexico adopted the Spanish language and Mestizo cultural identities. Coupled with a policy of castellanización this led to a rapid decline of speakers of all indigenous languages including Otomi, during the early 20th century.
| +Speakers of Otomi over 5 years of age in the ten Mexican states with most speakers (2005 census) | ||
| Mexico City | 12,460 | 5.2% |
| Querétaro | 18,933 | 8.0% |
| Hidalgo | 95,057 | 39.7% |
| Mexico State | 83,362 | 34.9% |
| Jalisco | 1,089 | 0.5% |
| Guanajuato | 721 | 0.32% |
| Puebla | 7,253 | 3.0% |
| Michoacán | 480 | 0.2% |
| Nuevo León | 1,126 | 0.5% |
| Veracruz | 16,822 | 7.0% |
| Rest of Mexico | 2,537 | 1.20% |
| Total: | 239,850 | 100% |
Although Otomi is vigorous in some areas, with children acquiring the language through natural transmission (e.g. in the Mezquital valley and in the Highlands), it is an endangered language. Three dialects in particular have reached moribund status: those of Ixtenco (Tlaxcala state), Santiago Tilapa (Mexico state), and Cruz del Palmar (Guanajuato state). On the other hand, the level of monolingualism in Otomi is as high as 22.3% in Huehuetla, Hidalgo, and 13.1% in Texcatepec, Veracruz). Monolingualism is usually significantly higher among women than among men. Due to the politics from the 1920s to the 1980s that encouraged the "Hispanification" of indigenous communities and made Spanish the only language used in schools, no group of Otomi speakers today has general literacy in Otomi, while their literacy rate in Spanish remains far below the national average.33.5% of Otomi speakers are illiterate compared with national average of 8.5%
Otomi has traditionally been described as a single language, although its many dialects are not all mutually intelligible. SIL International's Ethnologue considers nine separate Otomi languages based on literature needs and the degree of mutual intelligibility between varieties. It assigns an ISO code to each of these nine. Otomi in INALI, the Mexican National Institute of Indigenous Languages, avoids the problem of assigning dialect or language status to Otomian varieties by defining "Otomi" as a "linguistic group" with nine different "linguistic varieties"."A linguistic variety is defined as ‘a variety of speech (i) which has structural and lexical differences in comparison with other varieties within the same linguistic group, and (ii) which has a distinct sociolinguistic mark of identity for their users, different from the sociolinguistic identity born by speakers of other varieties'"(translation by E. Palancar in . Originaltext in Still, for official purposes, each variety is considered a separate language. Other linguists, however, consider Otomi to be a dialect continuum that is clearly demarcated from its closest relative, Mazahua language. For this article, the latter approach will be followed.
The assignment of dialects to the three groups is as follows:The classification follows Lastra except in regard to the Amealco dialect which follows
| 20,000 | |
| 100,000 | |
| 10,000 | |
| 736 | |
| 12,000 | |
| Otomí de Queretaro | Querétaro: Amealco Municipio: towns of San Ildefonso, Santiago Mexquititlán; Acambay Municipio; Tolimán Municipio. Also small numbers in Guanajuato.|| Hñohño, Ñañhų, Hñąñho, Ñǫthǫ || otq | 33,000 |
| 10,000 | |
| 100 | |
| 37,000 |
| Querétaro (incl. Mexquititlán) |
| Mezquital Otomi |
| (N: San Felipe) State of Mexico; (S: Jiquipilco) Temoaya Otomi |
| Tilapa Otomi |
| Texcatepec Otomi |
| Eastern Highland |
| Tenango Otomi |
| Ixtenco Otomi |
conducted mutual intelligibility tests in which they concluded that eight varieties of Otomi could be considered separate languages in regards to mutual intelligibility, with 80% intelligibility being needed for varieties to be considered part of the same language. They concluded that Texcatepec, Eastern Highland Otomi, and Tenango may be considered the same language at a lower threshold of 70% intelligibility. ''Ethnologue'' finds a similar lower level of 70% intelligibility between Querétaro, Mezquital, and Mexico State Otomi. The Ethnologue Temaoya Otomi is split off from Mexico State Otomi, and introduce Tilapa Otomi as a separate language; while Egland's poorly tested Zozea Otomi is subsumed under Anaya/Mezquital.
The phoneme inventory of the Proto-Otomi language from which all modern varieties have descended has been reconstructed as , the oral vowels , and the nasal vowels .
Stress in Otomi is not phonemic but rather falls predictably on every other syllable, with the first syllable of a root always being stressed.
Practical orthographies used to promote Otomi literacy have been designed and published by the Instituto Lingüístico de VeranoThe ILV is the affiliate body of SIL International in Mexico. and later by the national institute for indigenous languages (INALI). Generally they use diareses ë and ö to distinguish the low mid vowels and from the high mid vowels e and o. High central vowel is generally written ʉ or u̱, and front mid rounded vowel is written ø or o̱. Letter a with trema, ä, is sometimes used for both the nasal vowel and the low back unrounded vowel . Glottalized consonants are written with apostrophe (e.g. tz' for ) and palatal sibilant is written with x. This orthography has been adopted as official by the Otomi Language Academy centered in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo and is used on road signs in the Mezquital region and in publications in the Mezquital variety, such as the large 2004 SIL dictionary published by . A slightly modified version is used by Enrique Palancar in his grammar of the San Ildefonso Tultepec variety.
According to the most common analysis, Otomi has two kinds of bound morphemes, pro and . Proclitics differ from affixes mainly in their phonological characteristics; they are marked for tone and block nasal harmony. Some authors consider proclitics to be better analyzed as prefixes. The standard orthography writes proclitics as separate words, whereas affixes are written joined to their host root. Most affixes are suffixes and with few exceptions occur only on verbs, whereas the proclitics occur both in nominal and verbal paradigms. Proclitics mark the categories of definiteness and number, person, negation, tense and aspect – often fused in a single proclitic. Suffixes mark direct object and as well as clusivity (the distinction between inclusive and exclusive "we"), number, location and affective emphasis. Historically, as in other Oto-Manguean languages, the basic word order is Verb Subject Object, but some dialects tend towards Subject Verb Object word order, probably under the influence of Spanish. Possessive constructions use the order possessed-possessor, but modificational constructions use modifier-head order.
From the variety of Santiago Mexquititlan, Queretaro, here is an example of a complex verb phrase with four suffixes and a proclitic:
The initial proclitic bi marks the present tense and the third person singular, the verb root hon means "to look for", the - ga- suffix marks a first person object, the - wi- suffix marks dual number, and tho marks the sense of "only" or "just" whereas the - wa- suffix marks the locative sense of "here".
In most dialects, the pronominal system distinguishes four persons (first person Clusivity, second person and third person) and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). The system below is from the Toluca dialect.
The following atypical pronominal system from Tilapa Otomi lacks the inclusive/exclusive distinction in the first person plural and the dual/plural distinction in the second person.
| rʌ ngų́ 'the house' | yʌ yóho ngų́ 'the two houses' | yʌ ngų́ 'the houses' |
Classical Otomi, as described by Cárceres, distinguished neutral, honorific, and pejorative definite articles: ąn, neutral singular; o, honorific singular; nø̌, pejorative singular; e, neutral and honorific plural; and yo, pejorative plural.
Verb stems are inflected through a number of different processes: the initial consonant of the verb root changes according to a morphophonemic pattern of consonant mutations to mark present vs. non-present, and active vs. passive. Verbal roots may take a formative syllable or not depending on syntactic and prosodic factors. A nasal prefix may be added to the root to express reciprocality or middle voice. Some dialects, notably the eastern ones, have a system of verb classes that take different series of prefixes. These conjugational categories have been lost in the Western dialects, although they existed in the Western areas in the colonial period as can be seen from Cárceres's grammar.
Verbs are inflected for either direct object or indirect object (but not for both simultaneously) by suffixes. The categories of person of subject, tense, aspect, and mood are marked simultaneously with a formative which is either a verbal prefix or a proclitic depending on analysis. These proclitics can also precede nonverbal predicates. The dialects of Toluca and Ixtenco distinguish the Present tense, preterit, perfect, imperfect, Future tense, pluperfect, continuative, Imperative mood, and two . Mezquital Otomi has additional moods. On transitive verbs, the person of the object is marked by a suffix. If either subject or object is dual or plural, it is shown with a plural suffix following the object suffix. So the structure of the Otomi verb is as follows:
| Person of Subject/TAM (proclitic) | Prefixes (e.g. voice, adverbial modification) | Root | formative | Object suffix | 1st person emphatic suffix | Plural/Dual suffix |
The Preterite is marked by the prefixes do-, ɡo-, and bi-, the Perfect by to-, ko-, ʃi-, the Imperfect by dimá, ɡimá, mi, the Future by ɡo-, ɡi-, and da-, and the Pluperfect by tamą-, kimą-, kamą-. All tenses use the same suffixes as the Present tense for dual and plural numbers and clusivity. The difference between Preterite and Imperfect is similar to the distinction between the Spanish Spanish grammar habló 'he spoke (punctual)' and the Spanish Imperfect hablaba 'he spoke/he used to speak/he was speaking (non-punctual)'.
In Toluca Otomi, the semantic difference between the two subjunctive forms (A and B) has not yet been clearly understood in the linguistic literature. Sometimes subjunctive B implicates that is more recent in time than subjunctive A. Both indicate something counterfactual. In other Otomi dialects, such as Otomi of Ixtenco Tlaxcala, the distinction between the two forms is one of subjunctive as opposed to irrealis. The Past and Present Progressive are similar in meaning to English 'was' and 'is X-ing', respectively. The Imperative is used for issuing direct orders.
Verbs expressing movement towards the speaker such as ʔįhį 'come' use a different set of prefixes for marking person/TAM. These prefixes can also be used with other verbs to express 'to do something while coming this way'. In Toluca Otomi mba- is the third person singular Imperfect prefix for movement verbs.
When using nouns predicatively, the subject prefixes are simply added to the noun root:
In Toluca Otomi the object suffixes are - gí (first person), - kʔí (second person) and - bi (third person), but the vowel /i/ may Vowel harmony to /e/ when suffixed to a root containing /e/. The first person suffix is realized as -kí after and after certain verb roots, and as - hkí when used with certain other verbs. The second person object suffix may sometimes metathesise to - ʔkí. The third person suffix also has the - hpí/-hpé, - pí, - bí as well as a zero morpheme in certain contexts.
Object number (dual or plural) is marked by the same suffixes that are used for the subject, which can lead to ambiguity about the respective numbers of subject and object. With object suffixes of the first or second person, the verbal root sometimes changes, often by the deletion of the final vowel. For example:
A word class that refers to properties or states has been described either as adjectives or as . The members of this class ascribe a property to an entity, e.g. "the man is tall", "the house is old". Within this class some roots use the normal subject/T/A/M prefixes, while others always use the object suffixes to encode the person of the patient/subject. The fact that roots in the latter group encode the patient/subject of the predicate using the same suffixes as transitive verbs use to encode the patient/object has been interpreted as a trait of Split intransitivity, and is apparent in all Otomi dialects; but which specific stative verbs take the object prefixes and the number of prefixes they take varies between dialects. In Toluca Otomi, most stative verbs are conjugated using a set of suffixes similar to the object/patient suffixes and a third person subject prefix, while only a few use the Present Continuative subject prefixes. The following are examples of the two kinds of stative verb conjugation in Toluca Otomi:
Equational clauses can also be complex:
Clauses with a verb can be intransitive or transitive. In Ixtenco Otomi, if a transitive verb has two arguments represented as free noun phrases, the subject usually precedes the verb and the object follows it.
This order is also the norm in clauses where only one constituent is expressed as a free noun phrase. In Ixtenco Otomi verb-final word order is used to express focus on the object, and verb-initial word order is used to put focus on the predicate.
Subordinate clauses usually begin with one of the subordinators such as khandi 'in order to', habɨ 'where', khati 'even though', mba 'when', ngege 'because'. Frequently the future tense is used in these subordinate clause. Relative clauses are normally expressed by simple juxtaposition without any relative pronoun. Different negation particles are used for the verbs "to have", "to be (in a place)" and for imperative clauses.
Interrogative clauses are usually expressed by intonation, but there is also a question particle ši. Content questions use an interrogative pronoun before the predicate.
Transitivity and stative verbs
Transitive verbs are inflected for agreement with their objects by means of suffixes, while using the same subject prefixes as the intransitive verbs to agree with their agents. However, in all dialects a few intransitive verbs take the object suffix instead of the subject prefix. Often such intransitive verbs are stative, i.e. describing a state, which has prompted the interpretation that morphosyntactic alignment in Otomi is split between active–stative and accusative systems.
Syntax
Otomi has the nominative–accusative alignment, but by one analysis there are traces of an emergent active–stative alignment.
Word order
Some dialects have SVO as the most frequent word order, for example Otomi of Toluca and of San Ildefonso, Querétaro, while VSO word order is basic to other dialects such as Mezquital Otomi. Proto-Otomi is also thought to have had VSO order as verb-initial order is the most frequent basic word order in other Oto-Manguean languages. It has been suggested that some Otomi dialects are shifting from a verb-initial to a subject-initial basic word order under the influence of Spanish.
Clause types
describes the clause types in Ixtenco Otomi. The four basic clause types are indicative, negative, interrogative and imperative. These four types can either be simple, conjunct or complex (with a subordinate clause). Predicative clauses can be verbal or non-verbal. Non-verbal predicative clauses are usually equational or ascriptive (with the meaning 'X is Y'). In a non-vebal predicative clause the subject precedes the predicate, except in focus constructions where the order is reversed. The negation particle precedes the predicate.
Numerals
Like all other languages of the Mesoamerican linguistic area, Otomi has a vigesimal number system. The following numerals are from Classical Otomi as described by Cárceres. The e prefixed to all numerals except one is the plural nominal determiner (the a associated with -nʔda being the singular determiner).
Vocabulary
There are also considerable lexical differences between the Otomi dialects. Often terms will be shared between the eastern and southwestern dialects, while the northwestern dialects tend toward more innovative forms.The table below is based on data from Lastra (2006: 43–62).
Loan words
Otomi languages have borrowed words from both Spanish and Nahuatl. The phonological structure of loanwords is assimilated to Otomi phonology. Since Otomi lacks the trill /r/, this sound is normally altered to , as in lódá from Spanish ruda 'rue (medicinal herb)', while Spanish /l/ can be borrowed as the tap as in baromaʃi 'dove' from Spanish 'paloma'. The Spanish voiceless stops /p, t, k/ are usually borrowed as their voiced counterparts as in bádú 'duck' from Spanish pato 'duck'. Loanwords from Spanish with stress on the first syllable are usually borrowed with high tone on all syllables as in: sábáná 'blanket' from Spanish sábana 'bedsheet'. Nahuatl loanwords include ndɛ̌nt͡su 'goat' from Nahuatl teːnt͡soneʔ 'goat' (literally "beard possessor"), and different forms for the Nahuatl word for 'pig', pitso:tɬ. Both of these loans have obviously entered Otomi in the colonial period after the Spanish introduced those domestic animals. In the period before Spanish contact it appears that borrowing between Nahuatl and Otomi was sparse whereas there are numerous instances of calques from that period, probably due to widespread bilingualism.
Poetry
Among the the Otomi were well known for their songs, and a specific genre of Nahuatl songs called otoncuicatl "Otomi Song" are believed to be translations or reinterpretations of songs originally composed in Otomi. None of the songs written in Otomi during the colonial period have survived; however, beginning in the early 20th century, anthropologists have collected songs performed by modern Otomi singers. Anthropologists Roberto Weitlaner and Jacques Soustelle collected Otomi songs during the 1930s, and a study of Otomi musical styles was conducted by Vicente T. Mendoza. Mendoza found two distinct musical traditions: a religious, and a profane. The religious tradition of songs, with Spanish lyrics, dates to the 16th century, when missionaries such as Pedro de Gante taught Indians how to construct European style instruments to be used for singing hymns. The profane tradition, with Otomi lyrics, possibly dates to pre-Columbian times, and consists of lullabies, joking songs, songs of romance or ballads, and songs involving animals. As in the traditions of other Mesoamerican languages, a common poetic instrument is the use of parallelism, , (Mesoamerican couplet metaphors, similar to ) and repetition. In the 21st century a number of Otomi literary works have been published, including the work ra hua ra hiä by Adela Calva Reyes. The following example of an Otomi song about the brevity of life was recollected by Ángel María Garibay K. in the mid-twentieth century:Originally published in , republished in phonemic transcription in
Notes
Citations
(2025). 9789683690050, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, UNAM. ISBN 9789683690050
(2025). 9783110196283, Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 9783110196283
Yolanda Lastra (1992). 9789683622600, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, UNAM. ISBN 9789683622600
Yolanda Lastra (1997). 9789683660008, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, UNAM. ISBN 9789683660008
Yolanda Lastra (2025). 9789683695093, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, UNAM. ISBN 9789683695093
Yolanda Lastra (2025). 9789703233885, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, UNAM. ISBN 9789703233885
Juan M. Lope Blanch (2025). 9789703209767, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, UNAM. ISBN 9789703209767
(2025). 9783110185973, Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 9783110185973
Jacques Soustelle (1993). 9789681641160, Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos, Fondo de Cultura Económica. ISBN 9789681641160
(1985). 9789683100450, Instituto Lingüístico de Verano. ISBN 9789683100450
Further reading
External links
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