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. 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"). 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 .
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 language is 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. 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. 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
1Most commonly actually a nasalized palatal approximant.
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. (Another Mixtecan language, Trique, has one of the most complex tonal systems in the world, with one variety, Chicahuaxtla Trique, having at least ten tones and, according to some observers, as many as 16.)