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Language Lineage

Tepiman

O'odham, Pima Bajo and the Tepehuan languages, a chain running from the Arizona desert down the Sierra Madre, divided today by the US–Mexico border.

c. 1st millennium BCE – presentThe Sonoran desert of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, and the Sierra Madre Occidental of Chihuahua and Durango
On this page
  1. Desert and Sierra
  2. Missions, a Border and an Alphabet
  3. Where it's spoken
  4. Turning points

01

Desert and Sierra

The Tepiman languages form a long chain: O'odham (formerly called Papago and Pima) in the Sonoran desert, Pima Bajo in Sonora, and the Tepehuan languages in the mountains of Chihuahua and Durango. The O'odham are thought by many to be connected with the Hohokam, the canal-building farmers of prehistoric southern Arizona, though the link is debated.

02

Missions, a Border and an Alphabet

The Jesuit Eusebio Kino founded missions among the O'odham from 1687. In 1853 the Gadsden Purchase drew the US–Mexico border through the middle of O'odham land, dividing communities that still cross it for family and ceremony. In the 1970s the linguist Kenneth Hale and the Tohono O'odham scholar Albert Alvarez developed a practical alphabet for O'odham. It has since been used in dictionaries and teaching, and it became a model for linguists working with communities, not just on them.

On the map

Where it’s spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. Mexicoc. 55,000
  2. United Statesc. 14,000

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Splitc. 1st millennium BCE – 1st millennium CEContested

    A chain from desert to sierra

    Tepiman speakers spread from the Sierra Madre into the Sonoran desert, and the chain diverges into O'odham, Pima Bajo and Tepehuan. Their relationship to the prehistoric Hohokam is disputed.

    Sources (1)
    • Campbell, Lyle. 1997. American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  2. Contact1687 onward

    Jesuit missions

    Eusebio Kino's missions bring Spanish, Christianity, wheat and cattle into O'odham country, and Spanish loanwords into the language.

    Sources (1)
    • Spicer, Edward H. 1962. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
  3. Contact1853

    A border through O'odham land

    The Gadsden Purchase places the US–Mexico border across O'odham territory. On the US side English, and on the Mexican side Spanish, become the pressure languages, and the northern and southern communities drift apart.

    Sources (1)
    • Spicer, Edward H. 1962. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
  4. Writing1970s

    The Alvarez–Hale alphabet

    Albert Alvarez and Kenneth Hale create a practical O'odham orthography, adopted for dictionaries, literature and school programmes.

    Figures · Kenneth Hale (1934–2001)

    Sources (1)
    • Hinton, Leanne & Ken Hale, eds. 2001. The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice. San Diego: Academic Press.