I encountered Purepecha about a week ago when I spent four days in the village of Quinceo, Mexico. They referred to it as a dialect. "A dialect of what?" I asked. Spanish apparently. False. At least by my understanding of a dialect. A dialect is variation within a language. A language is a common form of communication where the speaker can be understood by the listener. In order for something to qualify as a dialect rather than a new language, it should be comprehensible to the majority of the speakers of the language as a whole. I very much doubt that any Spanish speaker who comes across Purepecha for the first time would be able to understand more than a few words.
I suspect that it is considered a Spanish dialect because of the large number of words that have been taken from Spanish. I could understand a few here and there, but these were still engulfed by Purepecha morphemes.
I didn't learn any words, but I distinctly remember hearing "maestroka" over the early morning vender intercom. I think this was the combination of the Spanish word maestro (teacher) and some kind of Purepecha suffix -ka.
The last thing I took note of we're the sound did the language. One man there who grew up speaking English and Spanish and learned Purepecha later in life said that he didn't have much of an accent in Purepecha because it sounds similar to English. Since I don't understand Purepecha at all, I was a little skeptical of this remark, but I did hear the -sh sound, which is rare in Spanish. Additionally, I think I heard some clicks...or maybe they were abnormally strong -k sounds.
I wish I could say more in depth or more profound, but this is it, and I felt it would be good to record my observations of my short encounter with the Purepecha language.
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