U·to-Az·tec·an

(yo͞o′tō-ăz′tĕk′ən)

1. A language phylum of North and Central America that includes Ute, Hopi, Nahuatl, and Shoshone.

2. A member of a people speaking a Uto-Aztecan language.

U′to-Az′tec′an adj.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Uto-Aztecan

(ˈjuːtəʊˈæztɛkən)

(Languages) a family of North and Central American Indian languages including Nahuatl, Shoshone, Pima, and Ute

adj

1. (Languages) of or relating to this family of languages or the peoples speaking them

2. (Peoples) of or relating to this family of languages or the peoples speaking them

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

U•to-Az•tec•an

(ˈyu toʊˈæz tɛk ən)

n.

1. a family of American Indian languages spoken or formerly spoken in the U.S. Great Basin, the U.S. Southwest and S California, and NW and W Mexico, including as well the Nahuatl language of central Mexico and Central America.

adj.

2. of or pertaining to Uto-Aztecan.

[1891]

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

Uto-Aztecan - a family of American Indian languages

Uto-Aztecan language

American-Indian language, Amerind, Amerindian language, American Indian, Indian - any of the languages spoken by Amerindians

Shoshonean, Shoshonean language, Shoshonian, Shoshonian language - a subfamily of Uto-Aztecan languages spoken mainly in the southwestern United States

Pima - the Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Pima

Aztecan - the Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Aztec

Nahuatl - the Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Nahuatl

Cahita - the Uto-Aztecan language of the Cahita

Tatahumara - the Uto-Aztecan language of the Tatahumara

Zapotec, Zapotecan - the language of the Zapotec

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References in periodicals archive

The Comanches, Uto-Aztecan language speakers, separated from the Shoshones before the 1700s and by the early 1700s were well-established on the Southern Plains.

Women's Leggings: Kiowa vs. Comanche

Northern Paiute is part of the northern branch of the Uto-Aztecan family, a group of related languages once spoken from the hardwood stands of North America to the rainforests of Central America.

More than words

The Shoshoneans first appeared in 1966 as a firsthand report on the condition of the remaining Native American tribes of the Great Basin plateau, who were all designated by their shared language, Shoshone--a Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family.

Edward Dorn and Leroy Lucas, The Shoshoneans: The People of the Basin-Plateau

A Prehistory of Western North America: The Impact of Uto-Aztecan Languages

Pima is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in central and southern Arizona.

Handbook of quantifiers in natural language

Simmondsia chinensis was named jojoba by the O'odham (an indigenous Uto-Aztecan peoples of the Sonoran Desert in the southwestern US), who treated burns with an antioxidant salve made from a paste of the jojoba nut.

The wonders of jojoba: this natural material has a wide range of application in personal care products

In the Americas, too, language replacement in the course of postulated farming dispersal has also been found to correlate for the Uto-Aztecan language family.

Mother Tongue Comes from Your Prehistoric Father

The topics include information structure, constituent order, and case in Warihio, an Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Mexico; the information structure of object-verb-subject in Vedic; the decline of post-verbal topical subjects in Serbo-Croat; prosody, information structure, and word order changes in Portuguese; and evidence for two types of focus position in Old High German.

Diachronic studies on information structure; language acquisition and change

The globalism that I seek to recount in southern California's past is the abiding influence of the Uto-Aztecan, Spanish, and Mexican periods on the later U.S.

Global California contra greater California