Chiquihuitlán Mazatec Explained

Chiquihuitlán Mazatec
Nativename:Hne naja
States:Mexico
Region:San Juan Chiquihuitlán, Oaxaca
Speakers:1,500
Date:2000
Ref:e25
Speakers2:340 monolinguals (1990 census)[1]
Familycolor:American
Fam3:Mazatecan
Iso3:maq
Glotto:chiq1250
Glottorefname:Chiquihuitlan Mazatec

Chiquihuitlán is the most divergent variety of Mazatec, 47% intelligible with Huautla, the prestige variety, and even less intelligible with other Mazatecan languages.

Background

Chiquihuitlán Mazatec is an endangered language with only around 1,500 native speakers today. This language is native to the Northern part of Oaxaca, Mexico.[2] It is also part of the Oto-Manguean languages, a family of languages native to the Americas.[3]

Language revitalization

There has been an undergoing effort to gather as much information about the language as possible. Usually the group of people that speak this language is relatively small, and are forced to leave their native language and adopt the language with the greatest possibility of communication. An effort to help people keep their native language while learning Spanish are those undergone by teacher Gloria Ruiz de Bravo Abuja that created the institution Instituto de Investigación e Integración Social del Estado de Oaxaca en 1969. Another program is Archivo de lenguas indígenas del estate de Oaxaca which publishes promising findings in a series of linguistic schemes.[4]

External links

The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America has audio samples of the language. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yGNWBEwvlUMaria Sabina - Mujer Espiritu video https://web.archive.org/web/20160701175032/http://www.ailla.utexas.org/search/browse.html?type=code

Notes and References

  1. García-Mendoza, A. J., Ordóñez Díaz, M. D., & Briones-Salas, M. (2004). Biodiversidad de Oaxaca (1st ed.). México: UNAM, Instituto de Biología
  2. Jamieson. Carole Ann. 1982. Conflated Subsystems Marking Person and Aspect in Chiquihuitlán Mazatec Verbs. International Journal of American Linguistics. 48. 2. 139–167. 10.1086/465725 . 1264678 . 143519194 . 0020-7071.
  3. Web site:
  4. Ruiz de Bravo Ahuja, Gloria., Troike, Rudolph., Suarez, Jorge. (1978). Mazateco de Chiquihuitlan, Oaxaca. Archives of Indigenous Languages in the State of Oaxaca. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED378791.pdf