The Misumalpan languages are a small family of Native American languages spoken on the east coast of Nicaragua and nearby areas. Joseph Greenberg considers them to constitute a subfamily of the nuclear Chibchan group.

They include:

• Miskito - nearly 200,000 speakers, mainly in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region of Nicaragua, but including some in Honduras.
• Sumalpan languages:
  • Sumo - some 7,000 speakers along the Huaspuc River and its tributaries, most in Nicaragua but some in Honduras. Many of them have shifted to Miskito. They are divided into several varieties:
    • Mayangna
      • Tawahka
      • Panamahka
      • Tuahka
    • Ulwa
  • Matagalpan languages:
    • Cacaopera - extinct; formerly spoken in the Morazán department of El Salvador
    • Matagalpa - extinct; formerly spoken in the central highlands of Nicaragua and the El Paraíso department of Honduras

Miskito became the dominant language of the Mosquito Coast from the late 1600s on, as a result of their alliance with the British Empire. In northeastern Nicaragua, it continues to be adopted by former speakers of Sumo. However, its sociolinguistic status is lower than that of the English-based creole of the southeast, and in that region Miskito seems to be losing ground. Sumo is endangered in most areas where it is found, although some evidence suggests that it was dominant in the region before the ascendancy of Miskito. The Matagalpan languages are long since extinct, and not very well documented.

All Misumalpan languages share the same phonology, apart from phonotactics. The consonants are p, b, t, d, k, s, h, w, y, and voiced and voiceless versions of m, n, ng, l, r; the vowels are short and long versions of a, i, u.

External links

• Ulwa Language home page
• The Misumalpan Causative Construction - Ken Hale
• Theoretical and Universal Implications of Certain Verbal Entries in Dictionaries of the Misumalpan Languages - Ken Hale
• The Joy of Tawahka - David Margolin
• Matagalpa Indigena - some words of Matagalpan

Bibliography

• Colette Craig & Kenneth Hale, "A Possible Macro-Chibchan Etymon", Anthropological Linguistics Vol. 34, 1992.
• Constenla Umaña, Adolfo (1987) ``Elementos de Fonología Comparada de las Lenguas Misumalpas, Revista de Filología y Lingüística de la Universidad de Costa Rica 13 (1), 129-161.
• Constenla Umaña A. (1998). Acerca de la relación genealógica de las lenguas lencas y las lenguas misumalpas, Communication presented at the First Archeological Congress of Nicaragua (Managua, 20-21 July), to appear in 2002 in Revista de Filología y Lingüística de la Universidad de Costa Rica 28 (1).
• Hale, Ken. El causativo misumalpa (miskitu, sumu). In Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca "Julio de Urquijo" 1996, 30:1-2.
• Hale, Ken (1991) ``Misumalpan Verb Sequencing Constructions, in C. Lefebvre, ed., Serial Verbs: Grammatical, Comparative, and Cognitive Approaches, John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
• Ruth Rouvier, "Infixation and reduplication in Misumalpan: A reconstruction" (B.A., Berkeley, 2002)
• Phil Young and T. Givón. "The puzzle of Ngäbére auxiliaries: Grammatical reconstruction in Chibchan and Misumalpan", in William Croft, Suzanne Kemmer and Keith Denning, eds., Studies in Typology and Diachrony: Papers presented to Joseph H. Greenberg on his 75th birthday, Typological Studies in Language 20, John Benjamins 1990.

Meta-Bibliography

• FDL bibliography (general, but search specific language names)
• Ulwa Language Home Page bibliography
• Moskitia bibliography