Ixcatec (in Ixcatec: xwja o xjuani) is a language spoken by the people of the Mexican village of Santa María Ixcatlan, in the northern part of the state of Oaxaca. The Ixcatec language belongs to the Popolocan branch of the Oto-manguean language family. It is believed to have been the second language to branch off from the others within the Popolocan subgroup, though there is a small debate over the relation it has to them.
According to the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, there were only 8 speakers of the language in 2008. In 2010, 190 speakers of Ixcatec were registered. In 2020, 195 people reported speaking the language . The small number of current speakers is the result of a steady decline over the last 60 years, which can be attributed to anti-illiteracy campaigns by the Mexican government that discouraged the use of indigenous languages, migration from the area to the cities, and the small initial population of speakers of the language.
Despite the lack of historical documentation in Ixcatec, written speech has been observed to use Latin script following the arrival of the Spaniards. The earliest document written in Ixcatec is from 1939, when native speaker Doroteo Jiménez wrote a letter to Lázaro Cárdenas, the president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940. Later on, an orthography for the language had begun development in the 1950s with reliance on the Spanish alphabet when necessary.
Ixcatec derives its name from the Nahuatl word ichcatl meaning 'cotton'. In Spanish it can be referred to by the term ixcateco, in which the added on suffix -teco stems from the Nahuatl suffixes -teca/-tecatl which means 'inhabitant of a place', especially one with a name ending in -tlan or -lan. This term can be traced back to the eighteenth century.
Classification
The Ixcatec language belongs to the Oto-manguean language family, and to the popolocan branch. The closest languages to Ixcatec, genetically speaking, are Mazatec, Chocholtec and Popolocan.
Characteristics
Like other Oto-manguean languages, Ixcatec is a tonal language and it distinguishes between long and short vowels. Due to the low number of speakers, Ixcatec is considered a language with a high risk of disappearing.
Phonology
Consonants
The following table presents the consonants of Ixcatec. Plosives can be voiceless or voiced (the second row contains the voiceless plosives while the third contains the voiced ones) as well as affricates. The voiceless bilabial stop /p/ and the trill /rr/ are the only consonants to be borrowed from Spanish (though there is only one case in which /p/ possibly was not: ʔu2ča1pi1 [ʔu2ša1pi1] ‘cenzontle’.
Most consonant groupings contain one of the following consonants: /ʔ/, /h/, and /n/. /ʔ/ and /h/ occur in the final position of a grouping, but precede nasals and /j/ whereas /n/ usually precedes a voiced consonant: /mb/, /nd/, /nd͡ʒ/, /ŋg/, etc.
Vowels
There are five oral and five nasal vowels in the Ixcatec inventory. The following table presents the pairs of vowels with the oral one preceding the nasalized version.
Vowels are grouped into diphthongs or non-diphthongs. A diphthong contains the vowel /i/ or /u/ (or their nasal counterparts) followed by a different vowel. However, both components of the diphthong must have the same manner of articulation (oral or nasal). Diphthongs generally appear in inflectional forms of stems ending in /i/ or /u/, or their nasalized versions, and are represented with one tone.
Additionally, vowels can be distinguished by length. A long vowel is composed of two of the same vowels with identical tones. It is represented with two vowels and a single tone (e.g. cee2 ‘do’, ce2 ‘moss’). A word-final long vowel can also be the result of suffixation. For example, the word ra2te3 ‘sandal’ followed by the suffix that indicates third-person possession creates ra2tee3 ‘his/her sandal’.
Phonological Alternations
A change in context influences the sound of the consonant /h/. /h/ is pronounced as a glottal fricative [h] in a nasal context and when it is near a consonant other than [r]. Some examples include thi2 ’cane’ [thi2] and nĩ1he˜2 ‘three’ [nĩ1he˜2]. However, in an oral context and when following an /r/, it becomes velarized, as is the case with si1hi3 ’foot’ [si1xi3].