Highland Chatino is an indigenous Mesoamerican language, one of the Chatino family of the Oto-Manguean languages. Dialects are rather diverse; neighboring dialects are about 80% mutually intelligible.

For grammatical details, see Chatino languages, which includes examples from Yaitepec dialect.

Eastern Chatino is spoken in 14 dialects in 17 communities that centered on the economic and cultural centers of Santa Catarina Juquila and Santiago Yaitepec. ISO assigns these dialects to four groups with different language codes, but there is no objective evidence that the dialects grouped together are closest to each other. Dialects include:

Yaitepec Chatino has the following phonemic consonants (Rasch 2002):

An epenthetic schwa sound [ə] is heard in between consonants.

Rasch (2002) reports ten distinct tones for Yaitepec Chatino: the four level tones of high /˥/, mid /˦/, low-mid /˨/, and low /˩/; the two rising tones /˦˥/ and /˨˦/; and the three falling tones /˥˦/, /˦˨/, /˨˩/, as well as a more limited falling tone /˦˩/, found in a few lexical items and in a few completive forms of verbs.

There are a variety of practical orthographies for Chatino, most based on Spanish orthography. Typically, ⟨x⟩ = /ʃ/, ⟨ch⟩ = /tʃ/, and /k/ is spelled ⟨c⟩ before back vowels but ⟨qu⟩ before front vowels.

In Quiahije Chatino, and perhaps more broadly across Highland Chatino, superscript capitals A–L are used as lexical tone letters: ⟨ᴬ ᴮ ꟲ ᴰ ᴱ ꟳ ᴳ ᴴ ᴵ ᴶ ᴷ ᴸ⟩, with additional letters ⟨ᴹ⟩ and ⟨꟱⟩ for tone sandhi. Not all of these are distinct in all dialects; rather, they mark pan-dialect tone-cognate sets.