Mixteco
The Mixtec languages
belong to the Mixtecan group of the Oto-Manguean language family. Mixtec is
spoken in Mexico and is closely related to Trique and Cuicatec. The varieties
of Mixtec are spoken by over half a million people. Identifying how many Mixtec
languages there are in this complex dialect continuum poses challenges at the
level of linguistic theory. Depending on the criteria for distinguishing
dialects from languages, there may be as few as a dozen or as many as fifty-three
Mixtec languages.
Mixtec is an
Oto-Manguean language of Mexico. Actually, depending on the linguist doing the
counting, there are somewhere between 12 and 60 different Mixtec languages,
each of which is difficult for speakers of the others to understand. (The
difference of opinion on the exact number is because some of the varieties are
considered to be dialects by some people and considered to be distinct Mixtecan
languages by others.) Taken together there are at least 400,000 speakers of Mixtec
languages in Mexico today. They are tone languages and have primarily VSO (Verb–subject–object
word order) word order.
The traditional range of
the Mixtec languages is the region known as La Mixteca, which is shared by the
states of Oaxaca, Puebla and Guerrero. Because of migration from this region,
mostly as a result of extreme poverty, the Mixtec 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 valley in Baja
California and parts of Morelos and Sonora, and into the United States. In
2012, Natividad Medical Center of Salinas, California had trained medical
interpreters bilingual in Mixtec as well as in Spanish; in March 2014,
Natividad Medical Foundation launched Indigenous Interpreting, "a
community and medical interpreting business specializing in indigenous
languages from Mexico and Central and South America," including Mixtec,
Trique, Zapotec, and Chatino.
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 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.
At Trápaga Asociados – Interpretation & Translation Agency, we work with all Mayan languages including Mixteco.
Please contact us with any job or project
inquiries.
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