Cuitlatec

Cuitlatec was a language isolate of Mexico, formerly spoken by an indigenous people in the state of Guerrero, historically in the towns of Ajuchitlan and Tetela del Rio and along the Costa Grande, though by the 1930s it survived only around San Miguel Totolapan. Structurally it had subject-verb-object word order, agglutinative and largely suffixing morphology, and a base-twenty counting system. By 1979 only two elderly women could recall roughly fifty words of the language, and it is considered extinct following the death of its last known speaker, Juana Can, in the 1960s; a controversial proposal by Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen would place it within an expanded Chibchan family, but this has not been generally accepted, and Cuitlatec is usually treated as unclassified.