The Mixtec () languages belong to the Mixtecan group of the Oto-Manguean language family. Mixtec is spoken in Mexico and is closely related to Trique and Cuicatec. The varieties of Mixtec are spoken by over half a million people.2000 census; the numbers are based on the number of the total population for each group and the percentages of speakers given on the website of the Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas, http://www.cdi.gob.mx/index.php?id_seccion=660, accessed 28 July 2008). Identifying how many Mixtec languages there are in this complex dialect continuum poses challenges at the level of linguistic theory. Depending on the criteria for distinguishing dialects from languages, there may be as few as a dozen or as many as fifty-three Mixtec languages.
Language name
The name "Mixteco" is a Nahuatl exonym, from mixtecatl, from mixtli ("cloud") + -catl ("inhabitant of place of").Campbell 1997:402) Speakers of Mixtec use an expression (which varies by dialect) to refer to their own language, and this expression generally means "sound" or "word of the rain": dzaha dzavui in Classical Mixtec; or "word of the people of the rain", dzaha Ñudzahui (Dzaha Ñudzavui) in Classical Mixtec.
Denominations in various modern Mixtec languages include tu'un savi , tu'un isasi or isavi , tu'un va'a , tnu'u ñuu savi , tno'on dawi , sasau , sahan sau , sahin sau , sahan ntavi , tu'un dau , dahan davi , dañudavi , dehen dau , and dedavi .INALI, 2008: Segunda sección 84-Tercera sección 3)
Distribution
The traditional range of the Mixtec languages is the region known as La Mixteca, which is shared by the states of Oaxaca, Puebla and Guerrero. Because of migration from this region, mostly as a result of extreme poverty, the Mixtec languages have expanded to Mexico's main urban areas, particularly the State of México and the Federal District, to certain agricultural areas such as the San Quintín valley in Baja California and parts of Morelos and Sonora, and into the United States. In 2012, Natividad Medical Center of Salinas, California had trained medical interpreters bilingual in Mixtec as well as in Spanish; in March 2014, Natividad Medical Foundation launched Indigenous Interpreting+, "a community and medical interpreting business specializing in indigenous languages from Mexico and Central and South America", including Mixtec, Trique, Zapotec, and Chatino.
Internal classification
The Mixtec languages are a complex set of regional dialects which were already in place at the time of the Spanish Conquest of the Mixteca region. The varieties of Mixtec are sometimes grouped by geographic area, using designations such as those of the Mixteca Alta, the Mixteca Baja, and the Mixteca de la Costa. However, the dialects do not actually follow the geographic areas, and the precise historical relationships between the different varieties have not been worked out.See Josserand (1983) for one important attempt. Adaptations of Josserand's dialect maps are published in Macaulay 1996. The situation is far more complex than a simple dialect continuum because dialect boundaries are often abrupt and substantial, some likely due to population movements both before and after the Spanish conquest. The number of varieties of Mixtec depends in part on what the criteria are for grouping them, of course; at one extreme, government agencies once recognized no dialectal diversity. Mutual intelligibility surveys and local literacy programs have led SIL International to identify more than 50 varieties which have been assigned distinct ISO codes."Ethnologue name language index", Ethnologue web site, accessed 28 July 2008. Attempts to carry out literacy programs in Mixtec which cross these dialect boundaries have not met with great success. The varieties of Mixtec have functioned as de facto separate languages for hundreds of years with virtually none of the characteristics of a single "language". As the differences are typically as great as between members of the Romance language family, and since unifying sociopolitical factors do not characterize the linguistic complex, they are often referred to as separate languages.
Phonology This section describes the sound systems of Mixtec by each variety.
Chalcotongo Mixtec The table below shows the phonemic inventory of a selected Mixtec language, Chalcotongo Mixtec.
Phoneme + Consonant phonemes of the Chalcotongo Mixtec language Labial Alveolar Palato-alveolar Palatal Velar Nasal m n, nᵈ ɲ [j̃]¹ (ŋᵍ) Stop b t k, kʷ Affricate tʃ, ⁿtʃ Fricative s ʃ, ʒ x Approximantw l Tap ɾ 1Most commonly actually a nasalized palatal approximant.
+ Vowels of the Mixtec languages Front Central Back Close Middle Open
Not all varieties of Mixtec have the sibilant . Some do not have the interdental fricative . Some do not have the velar fricative . A few have the affricate . By some analyses, the sounds and () are allophones conditioned by nasalization (see below), as are and , also and ().
Tone
One of the most characteristic features of Mixtec is its use of tones, a characteristic it shares with all other Otomanguean languages. Despite its importance in the language, the tonal analyses of Mixtec have been many and quite different one from another. Some varieties of Mixtec display complex tone sandhi.McKendry (2001) (Another Mixtecan language, Trique, has one of the most complex tonal systems in the world,Hollenbach (1984) with one variety, Chicahuaxtla Trique, having at least ten tones and, according to some observers, as many as 16.)Longacre (1957)
It is commonly claimed that Mixtec distinguishes three different tones: high, middle, and low. Tones may be used lexically; for example: Kuu to be Kuu to die
In some varieties of Mixtec, tone is also used grammatically since the vowels or whole syllables with which they were associated historically have been lost.
In the practical writing systems the representation of tone has been somewhat varied. It does not have a high functional load generally, although in some languages tone is all that indicates different aspects and distinguishes affirmative from negative verbs.
Nasalization The nasalisation of vowels and consonants in Mixtec is an interesting phenomenon that has had various analyses. All of the analyses agree that nasalization is contrastive and that it is somewhat restricted. In most varieties, it is clear that nasalization is limited to the right edge of a morpheme (such as a noun or verb root), and spreads leftward until it is blocked by an obstruent (plosive, affricate or fricative in the list of Mixtec consonants). A somewhat more abstract analysis of the Mixtec facts claims that the spreading of nasalization is responsible for the surface "contrast" between two kinds of bilabials ( and , with and without the influence of nasalization, respectively), between two kinds of palatals ( and nasalized —often less accurately (but more easily) transcribed as —with and without nasalization, respectively), and even two kinds of coronals ( and , with and without nasalization, respectively).Marlett (1992), McKendry (2001) Nasalized vowels which are contiguous to the nasalized variants are less strongly nasalized than in other contexts. This situation is known to have been characteristic of Mixtec for at least the last 500 years since the earliest colonial documentation of the language shows the same distribution of consonants.
Glottalization The glottalization of vowels (heard as a glottal stop after the vowel, and analyzed as such in early analyses) is a distinctive and interesting contrastive feature of Mixtec languages, as it is of other Otomanguean languages.Macaulay and Salmons (1995)
Yoloxóchitl Mixtec The sound system of Yoloxóchitl Mixtec (of Guerrero Mixtec) is described below.DiCanio, C. T., Zhang, C., Whalen, D. H., & García, R. C. (2019). Phonetic structure in Yoloxóchitl Mixtec consonants. Journal of the International Phonetic Association. doi:10.1017/S0025100318000294DiCanio, C. T., Amith, J., & García, R. C. (2012). Phonetic Alignment in Yoloxóchitl Mixtec Tone. Presented at the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA).DiCanio, Christian & Ryan Bennett. (To appear). Prosody in Mesoamerican Languages (pre-publication version). In C. Gussenhoven & A. Chen (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody.
Sound inventory + Yoloxóchitl Mixtec Consonants Bilabial Dental Alveolar Post-Alveolar Palatal Velar Labial-Velar Nasal m n Stop & Affricate p t̪ tʃ k kʷ Pre-nasalised Stop (ᵐb) (ⁿd) ᵑɡ Fricative s̪ ʃ (x) Flap (ɾ) Approximant β l j
+ Yoloxóchitl Mixtec Vowels Front Central Back Close i • ĩ u • ũ Mid e • ẽ o • õ Open a • ã
Notes: The syllable structure is (C)V(V); no consonant cluster or consonant coda allowed. Oral and nasal vowels are contrastive.
Tone Yoloxóchitl Mixtec has nine tones: .
Writing systems The Mixtecs, like many other Mesoamerican peoples, developed their own writing system, and their codices that have survived are one of the best sources for knowledge about the pre-Hispanic culture of the Oaxacan region prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. With the defeat of the lordship of Tututepec in 1522, the Mixtecs were brought under Spanish colonial rule, and many of their relics were destroyed. However, some codices were saved from destruction, and are today mostly held by European collections, including the Codex Zouche-Nuttall and the Codex Vindobonensis; one exception is the Codex Colombino, kept by the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. After the arrival of the Spanish, codices were gradually replaced by *lienzos*—large cloths used for pictorial and textual documentation—which combined the pre-Hispanic Mixtec writing system with Latin-alphabet glosses in Mixtec languages. The most notable example is the Lienzo Seler II, a colonial-period cloth from Coixtlahuaca.Viola König, On the Mount of Intertwined Serpents. The Pictorial History on Lienzo Seler II, Petersberg: Imhof Verlag, 2017. Online-Version
The missionaries who brought the Roman Catholic religion to the Mixtecs set about learning their language and produced several grammars of the Mixtec languages, similar in style to Antonio de Nebrija's Gramática Castellana. They also began work on transcribing the Mixtec languages into the Latin alphabet. In recent decades small changes in the alphabetic representation of Mixtec have been put into practice by the Academy of the Mixtec Language. Areas of particular interest include the following:
The representation of the feature that distinguishes glottalized vowels (or glottal stop, as in some earlier analyses). Some earlier alphabets used h; more commonly today a special kind of apostrophe is used. The representation of the high central unrounded vowel. Some earlier alphabets used y; today a barred-i (ɨ) is used. The representation of the voiceless velar stop. Most earlier alphabets used c and qu, in line with earlier government policies; today k is more commonly used. The representation of tone. Most non-linguistic transcriptions of Mixtec do not fully record the tones. When tone is represented, acute accent over the vowel is typically used to indicate high tone. Mid tone is sometimes indicated with a macron over the vowel, but it may be left unmarked. Low tone is sometimes indicated with a grave accent over the vowel, but it might be left unmarked, or it might be indicated with an underscore to the vowel.
The alphabet adopted by the Academy of the Mixtec Language and later by the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP), contains the following letters (indicated below with their corresponding phonemes).