Lachixío Zapotec is a

Zapotec language The Zapotec languages are a group of around 50 closely related indigenous Mesoamerican languages that constitute a main branch of the Oto-Manguean language family and which is spoken by the Zapotec people from the southwestern-central highland ...

Oaxaca Oaxaca ( , also , , from nci, Huāxyacac ), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Oaxaca ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Oaxaca), is one of the 32 states that compose the political divisions of Mexico, Federative Entities of Mexico. It is ...

Mexico Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...

. It is spoken in the

Sola de Vega District Sola de Vega District is located in the Sierra Sur Region of the State of Oaxaca, Mexico. The district center is Villa Sola de Vega. Municipalities The district includes the following municipalities: * San Francisco Cahuacúa * San Francisco ...

by around 3000 speakers in

Santa María Lachixío Santa María Lachixío is a town and municipality in Oaxaca in south-western Mexico. The municipality covers an area of km². It is part of the Sola de Vega District Sola de Vega District is located in the Sierra Sur Region of the State of Oaxa ...

and

San Vicente Lachixío San Vicente Lachixío is a town and municipality in Oaxaca in south-western Mexico. The municipality covers an area of 93.13 km². It is part of the Sola de Vega District Sola de Vega District is located in the Sierra Sur Region of the Stat ...

. While many other Zapotec languages have suffered major language shifts to Spanish, most children in these towns are raised with Zapotec and learn Spanish at an early age (Sicoli 2007: 28). Lachixío is part of the West Zapotec language branch, which is considered the earliest divergent branch of the Zapotec family and adjacent to the Chatino language family (Sicoli 2015). Many of the Zapotec languages are mutually unintelligible. However, some Zapotec languages share many grammatical features such as word and morpheme order as well as many lexical items. Like other Zapotec languages, Lachixío Zapotec is a tonal language with VSO word order. The language contains a variety of

clitics In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a wo ...

, including subject and object enclitics pronouns, which are prosodically bound to the following or preceding stressed unit (Sicoli 2007: 70).

References

Sources

*Sicoli, Mark A. 2000. "Loanwords and contact-induced phonological change in Lachixío Zapotec." Proceedings of the 25th annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistic Society. *Sicoli, Mark A. 2007. ''Tono: A linguistic ethnography of tone and voice in a Zapotec region''. University of Michigan PhD dissertation. *Sicoli, Mark A. 2010. "Shifting voices with participant roles: Voice qualities and speech registers in Mesoamerica." Language in Society 39(4): 521-553. *Sicoli, Mark A. 2011. "Agency and ideology in language shift and language maintenance." ''Ethnographic contributions to the study of endangered languages: A linguistic anthropological perspective'', edited by Tania Granadillo and Heidi Orcutt-Gachiri, 161-176. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. *Sicoli, Mark A. 2015. "Agency and verb valence in Lachixío Zapotec." ''Valence changes in Zapotec: Synchrony, Diachrony, Typology'', edited by Natalie Operstein & Aaron Sonnenschien. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, Typological Studies in Language Series.

External links

OLAC resources in and about the Lachixío Zapotec languageBasic information about the Lachixío Zapotec language
Zapotec languages {{Oto-Manguean-lang-stub Languages of Mexico Oto-Manguean languages