Mazatecan Languages

The Mazatecan languages are a group of closely related indigenous languages spoken by some 200,000 people in the area known as La Sierra Mazateca, which located in the Northern part of the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico as well as in adjacent areas of the states of Puebla and Veracruz.

The group is often described as a single language called Mazatec, but because several varieties are not mutually intelligible, they are better described as a group of languages. The languages belong to the Popolocan subgroup of the Oto-Manguean language family. Under the "Law of Linguistic Rights" they are recognized as "national languages" along with the other indigenous languages of Mexico and Spanish.

The Mazatec language is vigorous in many of the smaller communities of the Mazatec area, and in many towns it is spoken by almost all inhabitants, however the language is beginning to lose terrain to Spanish in some of the larger communities like Huautla de Jimenez and Jalapa de Díaz.

Like other Oto-Manguean languages, the Mazatecan languages are tonal, and tone plays an integral part in distinguishing both lexical items and grammatical categories. The centrality of tone to the Mazatec language is exploited by the system of whistle speech which is employed in most Mazatec communities and which allows speakers of the language to have entire conversations only by whistling.