Mazatecan languages

The Mazatecan languages are a group of closely related indigenous languages spoken by some 200,000 people in the area known as the Sierra Mazateca, which is in the northern part of the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, as well as in adjacent areas of the states of Puebla and Veracruz.

The group is often described as a single language called Mazatec, but because several varieties are not mutually intelligible, they are better described as a group of languages. The languages belong to the Popolocan subgroup of the Oto-Manguean language family. Under the General Law of Linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples, they are recognized as "national languages" in Mexico, along with Spanish and other indigenous languages.

The Mazatec language is vigorous in many of the smaller communities of the Mazatec area, and in many towns, it is spoken by almost everyone. But in some of the larger communities, such as Huautla de Jiménez and Jalapa de Díaz, more people are beginning to use Spanish more frequently.

Like other Oto-Manguean languages, the Mazatecan languages are tonal; tone plays an integral part in distinguishing both lexical items and grammatical categories. The centrality of tone to the Mazatec language is exploited by the system of whistle speech, used in most Mazatec communities, which allows speakers of the language to have entire conversations only by whistling.

The Mazatecan languages are part of the Oto-Manguean language family and belong to the family's Eastern branch. In that branch, they belong to the Popolocan subgroup, together with the Popoloca, Ixcatec and Chocho languages. Daniel Garrison Brinton was the first to propose a classification of the Mazatec languages, which he correctly grouped with the Zapotec and Mixtec languages. In 1892 he second-guessed his own previous classification and suggested that Mazatec was related to Chiapanec-Mangue and Chibcha.

Early comparative work by Morris Swadesh, Roberto Weitlaner and Stanley Newman laid the foundations for comparative Oto-Manguean studies. Weitlaner's student, María Teresa Fernandez de Miranda, was the first to propose reconstruction of the Popolocan languages. While the work cited Mazatec data, she left Mazatecan out of the reconstruction.

Subsequent work by Summer Institute linguist Sarah Gudschinsky gave a full reconstruction first of Proto-Mazatec (Gudschinsky 1956). She next reconstructed what she called Proto-Popolocan-Mazatecan (Gudschinsky 1959) (it was referred to as Popotecan, but this term was not widely adopted.)

The ISO 639-3 standard enumerates nine Mazatecan languages. They are named after the villages where they are commonly spoken (with the exception of Puebla Mazatec):