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Tepecano
Native to	Mexico
Region	Jalisco
Ethnicity	Tepecano
Extinct	1980s
Language family	Uto-Aztecan Piman (Tepiman) Tepecano
Language codes
ISO 639-3	tep
Glottolog	tepe1278
Map of   Tepecano and neighboring Chichimeca nations during the 16th century

The Tepecano language is an extinct indigenous language of Mexico belonging to the Uto-Aztecan language-family. It was formerly spoken by a small group of people in Azqueltán (earlier Atzqueltlán), Jalisco, a small village on the Río Bolaños in the far northern part of the state, just east of the territory of the Huichol people. Most closely related to Southern Tepehuán of the state of Durango, Tepecano was a Mesoamerican language and evinced many of the traits that define the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area. So far as is known, the last speaker of Tepecano was Lino de la Rosa (born September 22, 1895), who was still living as of February 1980.

Research on Tepecano was first carried out by the American linguistic anthropologist John Alden Mason in Azqueltán from 1911 to 1913. This work led to the publication of a monographic grammatical sketch in 1916 as well as an article on native prayers in Tepecano that Mason had collected from informants in 1918. Later field-research was conducted by American linguist Dennis Holt in 1965 and from 1979 to 80, but none of his results have so far been published.

Morphology

Tepecano is an agglutinative language, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several morphemes strung together.

Notes

1. Tepecano at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
2. Holt 2001: 30
3. Dennis Holt, personal communication

Bibliography

• Campbell, Lyle (1997). American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America. Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics, no. 4. William Bright (series general ed.) (OUP paperback  ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1. OCLC 32923907.
• Holt, Dennis (Spring 2001). "Valedictory: Lino de la Rosa" (PDF online facsimile). Ogmios Newsletter. 2.4 (16). Bath, England: Foundation for Endangered Languages: 30. ISSN 1471-0382. OCLC 223025309.
• Mason, J. Alden (June 1916). "Tepecano, a Piman Language of Western Mexico" (digitized reproduction online at Internet Archive). Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 25 (2). New York: the Academy: 309–416. Bibcode:1916NYASA..25..309M. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1916.tb55171.x. hdl:2027/iau.31858003180399. ISSN 0077-8923. OCLC 1946633. S2CID 86778121.
• Mason, J. Alden (May 1918). "Tepecano Prayers" (digitized reproduction online at Wikisource). International Journal of American Linguistics. 1 (2). New York: Douglas C. McMurtrie: 91–153. doi:10.1086/463718. ISSN 0020-7071. OCLC 31838203. S2CID 224808597.

• Agglutinative languages
• Piman languages
• Mesoamerican languages
• Extinct languages of North America
• Indigenous languages of Mexico
• Languages extinct in the 20th century
• 20th-century disestablishments in North America