The Yaqui or Yoeme live historically in the state of Sonora in northwestern Mexico, and in recent times also in Arizona. They are well known ethnographically and ethnohistorically through the works of Edward Spicer (e.g., 1980, 1984), and ethnopoetically through the work of Evers & Molina 1987. Their Uto-Aztecan language is closely related to that of the Mayo, in Sinaloa, and the two varieties are known collectively as Cáhita. Descriptive studies of Yaqui, including partial lexicons, have been published by writers including Johnson 1962, Lindenfeld 1973, Lionnet 1977, and recently by Molina et al. 1999; but no detailed reference grammar exists. The work by Molina et al. was, surprisingly, repudiated by one of its coauthors (Shaul 1999); yet, in spite of its shortcomings, it has been a useful reference for Yaqui lexicon. Now we also have the volume under review, by Zarina Estrada and coworkers, which contains no grammatical sketch but provides a substantial two-way dictionary plus a collection of texts.

This new book opens with a “Prologue” by Karen Dakin, placing Yaqui within the Uto-Aztecan family (13–20); a “Presentation” by Estrada (21–25), explaining the conventions of the dictionary; and an essay called “Semantics for a cultural document,” by Aarón Grageda Bustamante (27–43), which discusses the ethnographic and lexicographic background of the work. Next come a map of the Yaqui territory in Sonora (44) and a list of abbreviations (45–46), followed by the heart of the volume, the Yaqui–Spanish dictionary (47–206). Each lexical entry contains one or more illustrative examples. The “Spanish-Yaqui vocabulary” (207–93) is basically an index to the previous section. Appendices include “Names of animals” (297–300), “Names of plants” (301–3), “Kinship terms” (305–6), and “Spanish-Yaqui kinship terms” (307–8). The “Texts” (309–93) are mostly ethnographic, with a few traditional narratives; they are presented in a four-line interlinear format. With one exception, the authors of the texts are not named. The book ends with some pronoun paradigms (397–98), a list of bound morphemes (399–400), and a copious bibliography (401–5), including reference to the dictionary of Molina et al. 1999.

Comparison of the two volumes, which I will refer to as “Estrada” and “Molina,” is inevitable. Molina's Yaqui-English dictionary (17–184) contains only a few examples. It lists some entries that are not in Estrada, such as aakta ‘to put on head to carry; to gore’; these also include many loanwords from Spanish with partly Hispanic phonology, such as affiler ‘safety pin’ (from Sp. alfiler), and terms relating to religion, such as Aleluya ‘Easter Sunday’ (from Sp. aleluya ‘hallelujah’). Molina's English-Yaqui section (185–282) functions as an index. The book ends with appendices on alphabet and spelling (283–97), sentence structure (299–315), word structure (317–35), and “sentence complexity” (337–51). One gets the impression that Estrada is focusing more on Sonora usage, and Molina on Arizona. Estrada's book is more valuable in its inclusion of texts, Molina's in its inclusion of the appendices on grammar.

Both works are useful in the area of language contact, where the Yaqui have provided much food for thought in the past. As pointed out by Johnson 1943 and Spicer 1943, they were missionized in the colonial period by Jesuits, who encouraged Hispano-European blending of both culture and language. The result has been that the Yaqui language contains not only Nahuatl and Spanish loanwords dating from the 17th century – such as machta ‘to learn’, from Nah. machtia, and tomi ‘money’, from Sp. tomín ‘one-eighth of a peso’ – but also 20th-century borrowings from Spanish and English (e.g., inyeksionim ‘injection’ with Yaqui -im ‘plural/collective’; bejtab ‘bathtub’).¹

In the classic paper of Dozier 1956, Yaqui's openness to borrowing from Spanish is contrasted with the conservatism of Tewa, a pueblo language of New Mexico, and this contrast is traced to different types of sociocultural contact during the colonial period. This view has been accepted by other more recent writers (e.g. Brown 1999:9). However, further study of hispanisms in the southwestern United States has shown that Yaqui and Tewa are far from being polar opposites (Bright 2000:260). In fact, Tewa and the other pueblo languages contain rather more hispanisms than indicated by Dozier. In their acceptance of borrowed words, the pueblos can be considered moderate; by contrast, Yaqui and the neighboring O'odham (Pima-Papago) draw freely on the Spanish lexicon, while the Athabaskan languages of the area, Navajo and Apache, show almost no loanwords.

Hispanisms in Cáhita display lexical stratification, in which one old layer of words is clearly derived from a Nahuatl lingua franca spread by the Spanish conquistadores (Miller 1990a,b), for example Yaqui tajkaim ‘tortilla(s)’, from Nah. tlaxcalli. Other words, derived from Spanish, can be identified as old partly because they have not been common among hispanophones in recent centuries, for instance Yaqui laaben ‘violin’, from archaic Sp. rabel ‘rebeck, a stringed instrument’. Such words can also be recognized by the fact that they reflect Spanish phonology of the 16th century; an example is Yaqui siila ‘saddle’, from Sp. silla – not in the present-day pronunciation [síya], but rather in the earlier pronunciation [síl^ya]. The Estrada and Molina dictionaries provide further examples of all these types: Yaqui saami ‘adobe’ from Nah. xamitl; limeete ‘glass’, from archaic Sp. limeta ‘flask’; and na'aso ‘orange’ (Mayo naraaso) from Sp. naranjo ‘orange tree’ (earlier pronounced

. It is possible that some words of Spanish origin did not enter Yaqui directly, but rather through colonial Nahuatl, which contains many words of Spanish origin such as tomin ‘money’, xilah ‘saddle’, and tixeraz ‘scissors’ (from Span. tijeras, cf. Mayo tiseeram). Some borrowings in Yaqui illustrate a recent partial loss of intervocalic r and l – a change that has not occurred in Mayo; an example is ‘orange’, above.

In this kind of research, the volumes of Molina and Estrada can be used together to advantage. Above all, the work by Estrada and her colleagues is meticulous, attractive, and well designed for, to quote the subtitle, “preservación lingüística.”