Lachixío Zapotec is a
Zapotec language of
Oaxaca
Oaxaca, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Oaxaca, is one of the 32 states that compose the political divisions of Mexico, Federative Entities of the Mexico, United Mexican States. It is divided into municipalities of Oaxaca, 570 munici ...
,
Mexico
Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a country in North America. It is the northernmost country in Latin America, and borders the United States to the north, and Guatemala and Belize to the southeast; while having maritime boundar ...
. It is spoken in the
Sola de Vega District by around 3000 speakers in
Santa María Lachixío and
San Vicente Lachixío. 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, 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