Cora language
Cora is an indigenous language of Mexico of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It is spoken by the ethnic group that is widely known as the Cora but who refer to themselves as Naáyarite. The Cora inhabit the northern sierra of the Mexican state Nayarit which is named after its indigenous inhabitants. Cora is a Mesoamerican language and shows many of the traits defining the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area. Under the General Law of Linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples it is recognized as a "national language" along with 62 other indigenous languages and Spanish which have the same "validity" in Mexico .
Geographic distribution
Ethnologue distinguishes two main variants of Cora. One is called Cora del Nayar or Cora Meseño and is spoken mainly in and around the medium-altitude settlements of Mesa de Nayar and Conel Gonzales in the south of the el Nayar municipality of Nayarit, and has approximately 9,000 speakers. There are significant differences between some of these varieties and some sources distinguish between Cora Mariteco, Cora Presideño, Cora Corapeño and Cora Franciscqueño. But Ethnologue considers the mutual intelligibility between these and Meseño to be high enough to classify them as a single language.The other variant recognized by the Ethnologue is called Cora de Santa Teresa or Cora Tereseño and is spoken by approximately 7,000 people, for the most part in the high sierra in the north of el Nayar. Cora de Santa Teresa has such a low degree of mutual intelligibility with other Cora speech communities that Ethnologue considers it a separate variety. Due to recent migrations a small community of Coras exists in the United States in western Colorado.
Dialects
Cora speakers themselves recognize only five dialects: Cora de Jesús María, Cora de Mesa de Nayar, Cora de Sta. Teresa, Cora de Corápan and Cora de San Francisco. Highland speakers consider Cora of Preseidio de los Reyes to be identical to the dialect of the other lowland community Corápan, and Cora of Dolores to be identical to Cora of Sta Teresa.Cora is spoken in a number of dialects, some of which have difficult mutual intelligibility. The International Organization for Standardization distinguishes two languages, and the Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas recognizes nine.
Classification
The closest relatives of the Cora language is the Huichol language together with which it forms the Coracholan subgroup of the Uto-Aztecan languages. The Taracahitan group of languages containing among others the languages Tarahumara, Yaqui and Mayo is also related to Cora.- Uto-Aztecan
- *Coracholan branch
- **Huichol language
- ** Cora languages
Phonology
Consonants
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
| Close | |||
| Mid | |||
| Open |
Grammar
Cora is a verb-initial language; its grammar is agglutinative and polysynthetic, particularly inflecting verbs with many affixes and clitics. There are a number of adpositional clitics that can also be used as relational nouns.Nominal morphology
Nouns are marked for possession and exhibit several different plural patterns.Pluralization
Different classes of nouns mark the plural in different manners. The most common way is by means of suffixes - The suffixes used for pluralization are the following: -te, -mwa, -mwa'a, -tse, -tsi, -kʉ, -sʉ, -se, -si, -ri and -i. Other ways to form the plural is by reduplication of the final vowel of a noun stem or by shifting the accent from one syllable to the other. Another class of works form their plurals by suppletion.Possession
Possessed nouns are marked with a prefix expressing the person and number of their possessor.The forms of the prefix expressing first person singular is ne-, na-, or ni-, for second person singular it is a-, mwa'a-, a'a-. The third person singular is marked by the prefix ru-. A first person plural possessor is marked by the prefix ta-, second person plural by ha'amwa- and third person plural by wa'a-. Furthermore, there are two suffixes. One, -ra'an is used to mark an obviative or fourth person possessor. The other is -me'en used to mark a plural possessum of a singular possessor.
| Number/person of Possessor | Singular | Plural |
| 1. person | nechi'i "my house" | tachi'i "our house" |
| 2. person | achi'i "your house" | há'amwachi'i "Your house" |
| 3. person | ruchi'i "his/her own house" | wa'áchi'i "Their house" |
| 4. person | chí'ira'an "the house of the other" | |
| pl. possessum + 3.p.sg. possessor | chí'imeen "his/her houses" |