Chiquihuitlán is the most divergent variety of

Mazatec The Mazatec are an indigenous people of Mexico who inhabit the Sierra Mazateca in the state of Oaxaca and some communities in the adjacent states of Puebla and Veracruz. Language family The Mazatecan languages are part of the Popolocan family w ...

, less than 50% intelligible with Huautla, the

prestige variety In sociolinguistics, prestige is the level of regard normally accorded a specific language or dialect within a speech community, relative to other languages or dialects. Prestige varieties are language or dialect families which are generally con ...

, 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. It is also part of the Oto-Manguean languages, a family of languages native to the Americas.

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.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

References

External links

The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America has audio samples of the language

Maria Sabina - Mujer Espiritu vide

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chiquihuitlan Mazatec Mazatecan languages