The Mixtec language, actually multiple languages, belong to Otomanguean language family of Mexico

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

, and are closely related to the Trique and Cuicatec languages. They are spoken by over half a million people. Identifying how many Mixtec languages there are in this complex dialect continuum

Dialect continuum

A dialect continuum, or dialect area, was defined by Leonard Bloomfield as a range of dialects spoken across some geographical area that differ only slightly between neighboring areas, but as one travels in any direction, these differences accumulate such that speakers from opposite ends of the...

 poses challenges at the level of linguistic theory. Depending on the criteria for distinguishing dialects from languages, there may be as many as fifty Mixtec languages.

Language name

The name "Mixtec" is a Nahuatl

Nahuatl

Nahuatl is thought to mean "a good, clear sound" This language name has several spellings, among them náhuatl , Naoatl, Nauatl, Nahuatl, Nawatl. In a back formation from the name of the language, the ethnic group of Nahuatl speakers are called Nahua...

 exonym, from miʃ 'cloud' teka 'inhabitant of place of'. Speakers of Mixtec use an expression (which varies by dialect) to refer to their own language, and generally this expression means "word of the rain": Tu'un Sávi [tũˀũ saβi] in one variety, for example, and Dà'àn Dávi [ðãˀã ðaβi] in another.

History

The Mixtec language group belongs to the Otomanguean family, whose urheimat

Urheimat

Urheimat is a linguistic term denoting the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language...

may be the valley of Tehuacán (Puebla

Puebla

Puebla officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Puebla is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 217 municipalities and its capital city is Puebla....

). This site was one of the places of the domestication of maize. The thousand-year presence of Otomanguean-speaking groups in this region makes it probable that they were active in this domestication process, which favored the inhabitants of the Altiplano's transition to a sedentary lifestyle and thus influenced the development of Mesoamerican civilization. Campbell and Kaufman have proposed that the Otomanguean languages began to diverge about 1500 BCE. The difficulty of establishing more general relationships between the eight subgroups of the family presents a difficulty for making more detailed inferences on the historical development of the languages.

Proto Otomanguean has been reconstructed by Robert Longacre and Calvin Rensch. The phonological system of the protolanguage has nine consonants, four vowels, and four tones. The groups of consonants and the diphthongs formed from this limited repertory would have been the origin of the phonemes in the daughter protolanguages of the various subgroups of Proto-Otomanguean. Some of the most significant changes in the diversification of Proto-Otomanguean phonemes into Proto-Mixtecan phonemes are the following:

Proto-Otomanguean	**t	**k	**kʷ	**s	**n	**y	**w	**nt	**nk	**nkʷ	**ns	**nn	**ny	**nw
Proto-Mixtecan	*t	*k		*θ		*y	*w	*ⁿd	*ⁿg	*ⁿgʷ	*ⁿgʷ		*l	*m

Rensch revised the reconstruction work of Longacre. He revised the probable phonological inventory and described some of his proposals, based on comparisons of the cognates in the Mixtecan languages. After this work, he proposed a reconstruction of the phonological system of Proto-Mixtecan. This proposal contains sixteen consonants, four vowels, and four tones.

Reconstruction of the Proto-Mixtecan consonant system
	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glotal
Oclusivas		*t *ⁿd				*k *kʷ *ⁿg *ⁿgʷ	*ʔ
Fricatives		*θ				*x *xʷ	*h
Aproximants		*l			*j	*w
Nasal consonant Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...	*m	*n
Source: Rensch (1977): 59.

Distribution

The traditional range of the Mixtecan languages is the region known as La Mixteca

La Mixteca

La Mixteca is a cultural, economic and political region that covers parts of the states of Puebla, Guerrero and Oaxaca in south-central Mexico....

, which is shared by the states of Oaxaca

Oaxaca

Oaxaca , , officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Oaxaca is one of the 31 states which, along with the Federal District, comprise the 32 federative entities of Mexico. It is divided into 571 municipalities; of which 418 are governed by the system of customs and traditions...

, Puebla

Puebla

Puebla officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Puebla is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 217 municipalities and its capital city is Puebla....

 and Guerrero

Guerrero

Guerrero officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Guerrero is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 81 municipalities and its capital city is Chilpancingo....

. Because of migration from this region, mostly as a result of extreme poverty, the Mixtecan 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

San Quintín, Baja California

San Quintín is a coastal town on the west coast of the Mexican state of Baja California, in the municipio of Ensenada. San Quintín has beautiful beaches and several places for tourists to stay. Tourists can enjoy fishing, camping, bird watching, surfing, and clam digging...

 valley in Baja California

Baja California

Baja California officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Baja California is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is both the northernmost and westernmost state of Mexico. Before becoming a state in 1953, the area was known as the North...

 and parts of Morelos

Morelos

Morelos officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Morelos is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 33 municipalities and its capital city is Cuernavaca....

 and Sonora

Sonora

Sonora officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Sonora is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 72 municipalities; the capital city is Hermosillo....

, and even into the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

.

Dialectal variation

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 chain 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

SIL International

SIL International is a U.S.-based, worldwide, Christian non-profit organization, whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy, translate the Christian Bible into local languages,...

 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.

Phonemes

The simple presentation of the phonemes of Mixtec is complicated by the significant internal diversity to this language or family of languages. Furthermore, different analyses of the phonology have given quite different results; the phonology of these languages is deceptively simple-looking and much more interesting than it first appears to be. The list below presents some of the most common consonants and vowels shared by the different Mixtec languages (excluding sounds only found in loanwords).

Vowels of the Mixtec languages
	Front		Central		Back
Close	i		ɨ		u
Middle	e				o
Open			a
Plus nasalization and glottalization

Not all varieties of Mixtec have the sibilant /s/. Some do not have the interdental fricative /ð/. Some do not have the velar fricative /x/. A few have the affricate /ts/. By some analyses, the sounds /m/ and /w/ ([β]) are allophones conditioned by nasalization (see below), as are /n/ and /nᵈ/, also /ɲ/ and /j/ ([ʒ]).

Tones

One of the most particular features of Mixtec is its use of tones

Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...

, 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

Tone sandhi

Tone sandhi is a feature of tonal languages in which the tones assigned to individual words vary based on the pronunciation of the words that surround them in a phrase or sentence. It is a type of sandhi, or fusional change, from the Sanskrit word for "joining".-Languages with tone sandhi:Not all...

. (Another Mixtecan language, Trique

Trique language

The Trique language is an Oto-Manguean language of Mexico spoken by the Trique indigenous group of the state of Oaxaca and elsewhere...

, 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.)

It is commonly claimed that Mixtec distinguishes three different tones: high, middle, and low. Tones may be used lexically; for example:

Kuu [kùū] to be

Kuu [kūù] 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 (/m/ and /β/, with and without the influence of nasalization, respectively), between two kinds of palatals (/ʒ/ and nasalized /j/--often less accurately (but more easily) transcribed as /ɲ/--with and without nasalization, respectively), and even two kinds of coronals (/n/ and /nᵈ/, with and without nasalization, respectively). 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.

Writing systems

The Mixtecs, like many other Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica is a region and culture area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and...

n peoples, developed their own writing system

Mixtec writing

Mixtec writing originated as a logographic writing system during the Post-Classic period in Mesoamerican history. Records of genealogy, historic events, and myths are found in the pre-Columbian Mixtec codices. The arrival of Europeans in 1520 AD caused changes in form, style, and the function of...

, 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

Tututepec

Tututepec is a Mesoamerican archaeological site located in the lower Río Verde valley on the coast of Oaxaca that formed the nucleus of an extensive Mixtec state during the Late Postclassic period...

 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

Codex Zouche-Nuttall

The Codex Zouche-Nuttall is an accordion-folded pre-Columbian piece of Mixtec writing, now in the British Museum . It is one of three codices that record the genealogies, alliances and conquests of several 11th and 12th-century rulers of a small Mixtec city-state in highland Oaxaca, the Tilantongo...

 and the Codex Vindobonensis

Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I

Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I, also known as Codex Vindobonensis C, or Codex Mexicanus I is an accordion-folded pre-Columbian piece of Mixtec writing. It is a ritual-calendrical and genealogical document dated to the 14th century.- Contents :...

; one exception is the Codex Colombino

Codex Colombino

The Codex Colombino is a part of a Mixtec codex held in the collection of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. It is the only Mesoamerican codex that remains in Mexican territory. It deals with the genealogy, marriages and bellicose conquests of the Mixtec lord Eight Deer Jaguar Claw...

, kept by the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City

Mexico City

Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...

.

The missionaries who brought the Roman Catholic religion

Religion

Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...

 to the Mixtecs set about learning their language and produced several grammars of the Mixtec language, similar in style to Antonio de Nebrija

Antonio de Nebrija

Antonio de Lebrija , also known as Antonio de Nebrija, Elio Antonio de Lebrija, Antonius Nebrissensis, and Antonio of Lebrixa, was a Spanish scholar, known for writing a grammar of the Castilian language, credited as one of the first published grammars of a Romance language...

's Gramática Castellana. They also began work on transcribing the Mixtec langages 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

Academy of the Mixtec Language

The Academy of the Mixtec Language was founded in 1997 by a group of indigenous activists from the Mixtec people, with the aim of creating mechanisms for the preservation and usage promotion of the Mixtecan languages, their indigenous languages....

. 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 overt 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).

Alphabet of the Mixtecan Languages (ndusu tu'un sávi)
Symbol	IPA International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...	Example	Meaning	Approximate pronunciation
a	a	andívi	sky	Similar to the English a in father
ch	tʃ	chitia	banana	Like English ch in chocolate
d	ð	de	he	Like English th in father
e	e	ve'e	home	Like Spanish e in este
g	ɡ	ga̱	more	Like English g in go
i	i	ita̱	flower	Like English i in machine
ɨ	ɨ	kɨni	pig	Like Russian ы or Romanian î
j	x	ji̱'in	shall drop	Like the j in Mexican Spanish
k	k	kúmi	four	Hard c, like English cool
l	l	luu	beautiful	Like Spanish l in letra
m	m	ña'ma̱	shall confess	Like English m in mother
n	n	kuná'ín	shall cease	Like English n in no
nd	nᵈ	ita ndeyu̱	orchid	Pronounced similar to an n followed by a slight non-nasal d-like transition to the oral vowel.
ng	ŋ	súngo̱o	to settle	Like English ng in eating
ñ	ɲ	ñuuyivi	world	Similar to Spanish ñ in caña, but typically without letting the tongue actually touch the hard palate.
o	o	chiso	sister-in-law	Similar to English o in toe
p	p	pi'lu	piece	Similar to English p in pin
r	ɾ	ru'u	I	Is sometimes trilled.
s	s	sá'a	cunningness	Like English s in sit
t	t	tájí	shall send	Like English t in tin
ts	ts	tsi'ina	puppy-dog	Like ț in Romanian Romanian language Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...  or ц in Russian Russian language Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
u	u	Nuuyoo	Mexico	Like English u in tune
v	β	vilu	cat	Similar to Spanish v in lava
x	ʃ	yuxé'é	door	Like the initial sound in English shop
y	ʒ	yuchi	dust	Like English ge in beige
' |ˀ	ndá'a	hand	When a vowel is glottalized it is pronounced as if it ends in a glottal stop. It is not uncommon for a glottalized vowel to have an identical but non-glottalized vowel after it.

One of the main obstacles in establishing an alphabet for the Mixtec language is its status as a vernacular

Vernacular

A vernacular is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, as opposed to a language of wider communication that is not native to the population, such as a national language or lingua franca.- Etymology :The term is not a recent one...

 tongue. The social domain of the language is eminently domestic, since federal law requires that all dealings with the state be conducted in Spanish, even though the country's autochthonous languages enjoy the status of "national languages". Few printed materials in Mixtec exist and, up to a few years ago, written literature in the language was practically non-existent. There is little exposure of Mixtec in the media, other than on the CDI

National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples

The National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples is a decentralized agency of the Mexican Federal Public Administration. It was founded in 2003 as a replacement for the National Indigenist Institute . It has its headquarters in Mexico City and, since 15 December 2006, has been...

's indigenous radio system – XETLA and XEJAM in Oaxaca; XEZV-AM

XEZV-AM

XEZV-AM is an indigenous community radio station that broadcasts in Spanish, Nahuatl, Mixtec and Tlapanec from Tlapa de Comonfort in the Mexican state of Guerrero....

 in Guerrero; and XEQIN-AM

XEQIN-AM

XEQIN-AM is an indigenous community radio station that broadcasts in Spanish, Mixtec, Zapotec and Triqui from San Quintín in the Mexican state of Baja California....

 in Baja California – and a bilingual radio station based in the USA in Los Angeles, California

Los Angeles, California

Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...

, where a significant Mixtec community can be found.

At the same time, the fragmentation of the Mixtec language and its varieties means that texts published in one variety may be utterly incomprehensible to speakers of another. In addition, most speakers are unaware of the official orthography adopted by the SEP and the Mixtec Academy, and some even doubt that their language can lend itself to a written form.

First and second person pronouns

Many varieties (but not all) have distinct "formal" and "informal" pronouns for first person and second person (except in the first person plural inclusive). If addressing a person of his own age or older, the speaker uses the formal pronouns. If addressing a younger person, the speaker uses the informal pronouns. The first person exclusive pronouns may be interpreted as either singular or plural. The second person pronouns may also be interpreted as either singular or plural.

It is common to find a first person inclusive form that is interpreted as meaning to include the hearer as well as the speaker.

First and second person pronouns have both independent forms and dependent (enclitic) forms. The dependent forms are used when the pronoun follows a verb (as subject) and when it follows a noun (as possessor). The independent forms are used elsewhere (although there are some variations on this rule).

• Personal pronoun as direct object

Jiní de sa̱ñá

[knows 3m 1exc]

"He knows me."

• Personal pronoun in preverbal position

Ró'ó kí'i̱n va̱'a ga

[2 will.go good more]

"It will be better if you go."

• Personal pronoun in normal subject position

Va̱ni nisá'a ró

[well did 2]

"You did well."

Third person pronouns

For the third person pronouns, Mixtec has several pronouns that indicate whether the referent is a man, a woman, an animal, a child or an inanimate object, a sacred or divine entity, or water. Some languages have respect forms for the man and woman pronouns. Some languages have other pronouns as well (such as for trees.) (These pronouns show some etymological affinity to nouns for 'man', 'woman', 'tree', etc., but they are distinct from those nouns.) These may be pluralized (in some varieties, if one wishes to be explicit) by using the common plural marker de in front of them, or by using explicit plural forms that have evolved.

Interrogative pronouns

Mixtec has two interrogatives

Interrogative word

In linguistics, an interrogative word is a function word used for the item interrupted in an information statement. Interrogative words are sometimes called wh-words because most of English interrogative words start with wh-...

, which are na vé ([²na ³ve]= "what/which"?) and nasaa ([²na.²saa]= "how much/many?"). The tone of these does not change according to the tense, person, or tone of the surrounding phrase.

Mixtec verb tenses

[s.³teẽ]
|stéén
[s.³teẽ]
|ni-steén
[²ni s.²te³ẽ]
|to teach
|-
|skáji
[s.³ka.²xi]
|skáji
[s.³ka.²xi]
|ni-skáji
[²ni s.³ka.²xi]
|to feed
|-
|skɨvɨ
[s.³kɨ.²vɨ]
|skívɨ
[s.³kɨ.²vɨ]
|ni-skívɨ
[²ni s.³kɨ.²vɨ]
|to put
|-
|stáan
[s.³ta¹ã]
|stáan
[s.³ta¹ã]
|ni-stáan
[²ni s.³ta¹ã]
|to destroy
|-
|ndukú
[²ndu.³ku]
|ndúkú
[³ndu.³ku]
|ni-ndukú
[²ni ²ndu.³ku]
|to seek
|-
|kunu
[²ku.²nu]
|kúnu
[³ku.²nu]
|ni-kunu
[²ni ²ku.²nu]
|to sew
|-
|kata
[²ka.²ta]
|jíta
[³ji.²ta]
|ni-jita
[²ni ²ji.²ta]
|to sing
|-
|kasɨ
[²ka.²sɨ]
|jésɨ
[³xe.²sɨ]
|ni-jésɨ
[²ni ³xe.²sɨ]
|to close
|-
|kua̱'a
[²ku¹a'.²a]
|jé'e
[²xe.²e]
|ni-je̱'e
[²ni ¹xe'.²e]
|to give
|-
|kusu̱
[²ku.¹su]
|kíxí
[³ki.³ʃi]
|ni-kixi̱
[²ni ²ki.¹ʃi]
|to sleep
|}