Tepehuán is the name of two closely related languages of the Piman

Piman languages

Piman refers a group of languages within the Uto-Aztecan family that are spoken by ethnic groups spanning from Arizona in the north to Durango, Mexico in the south.The Piman languages are as follows :...

 branch of the Uto-Aztecan

Uto-Aztecan languages

Uto-Aztecan or Uto-Aztekan is a Native American language family consisting of over 30 languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found from the Great Basin of the Western United States , through western, central and southern Mexico Uto-Aztecan or Uto-Aztekan is a Native American language family...

 language family, both spoken in northern Mexico

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

. The language is called O'otham by its speakers.

Northern Tepehuán

Northern Tepehuán is spoken by 8,000 Tepehuán

Tepehuán

The Tepehuán are a Native American ethnic group in northwest Mexico, whose villages at the time of Spanish conquest spanned a large territory along the Sierra Madre Occidental from Chihuahua and Durango in the north to Jalisco in the south...

 people (1990 census) in the south of the state of Chihuahua.

Southern Tepehuán

Southern Tepehuán is divided into the southeastern and southwestern group. Southeastern Tepehuán is spoken by 9,937 people (2000 WCD) in the Mezquital Municipio of the state of Durango

Durango

Durango officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Durango is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. The state is located in Northwest Mexico. With a population of 1,632,934, it has Mexico's second-lowest population density, after Baja...

.
Southern Tepehuán coexists with the Mexicanero

Mexicanero

Mexicanero is the name used by the speakers of the variety of the Nahuatl language spoken in southern Durango to refer to their language. It is a member of the Nahuan branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It has around 1000 speakers in the remote towns of San Pedro Jícora and San Juan...

 nahuatl language, there is some intermarriage between the two ethnic groups and a number of speakers are trilingual in Mexicanero, Tepehuán and Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

The extinct Tepecano language appears to have been a variety of Southern Tepehuán.

Southwestern Tepehuán is spoken by around 8,187 (2000 WCD) people in Southwestern Durango.

Media

Tepehuán-language programming is carried by the CDI

National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples

The National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples is a decentralized agency of the Mexican Federal Public Administration. It was founded in 2003 as a replacement for the National Indigenist Institute . It has its headquarters in Mexico City and, since 15 December 2006, has been...

's radio stations XEJMN-AM

XEJMN-AM

XEJMN-AM is an indigenous community radio station that broadcasts in Spanish,Cora, Huichol, Tepehuano and Nahuatl from Jesús María, municipality of El Nayar, in the Mexican state of Nayarit....

, broadcasting from Jesús María, Nayarit

Jesús María, Nayarit

Jesús María is the municipal seat of the municipality of El Nayar in the Mexican state of Nayarit. The population was 1,783 in 2000.XEJMN-AM, a government-run indigenous community radio station that broadcasts in Cora, Huichol, Tepehuano and Nahuatl, is based in Jesús María.-References:...

, and XETAR, based in Guachochi, Chihuahua.

Morphology

Tepehuán is an agglutinative language, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several morpheme

Morpheme

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...

s strung together.