The Maratino language is an extinct, poorly documented language that was formerly spoken in the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico. It is primarily known to modern linguistics through a single historical source: a bilingual Spanish-Maratino catechism and brief vocabulary compiled by the Franciscan missionary Fray Juan Caballero in approximately 1791. This manuscript was recovered from the archives of the San Carlos district in Tamaulipas.
The speakers of the Maratino language inhabited the Sierra de Tamaulipas and the surrounding plains. By the late 18th century, the population had significantly declined, and the language eventually became extinct as the surviving speakers were assimilated into Spanish-speaking society or other indigenous groups.
In terms of linguistic classification, Maratino is generally categorized as an unclassified language or a language isolate. In 1940, linguist John R. Swanton proposed a relationship between Maratino and the Coahuiltecan or Hokan language families; however, these connections remain unproven due to the limited amount of surviving data. Most contemporary scholars, such as Lyle Campbell, treat it as unclassified because the extant corpus—consisting of fewer than 100 words and phrases—is insufficient to establish a definitive genetic relationship with neighboring languages like Comecrudo or Cotoname.
The linguistic data provided by Caballero’s manuscript suggests that Maratino utilized a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order and featured a suffixing morphology. However, because the primary source is a religious translation, researchers have noted that the grammatical structure may have been influenced by the Spanish syntax of the original text, making a comprehensive grammatical reconstruction difficult.