Mixtec Language - Writing Systems

Writing Systems

The Mixtecs, like many other Mesoamerican peoples, developed their own writing system, and their codices that have survived are one of the best sources for knowledge about the pre-Hispanic culture of the Oaxacan region prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. With the defeat of the lordship of Tututepec in 1522, the Mixtecs were brought under Spanish colonial rule, and many of their relics were destroyed. However, some codices were saved from destruction, and are today mostly held by European collections, including the Codex Zouche-Nuttall and the Codex Vindobonensis; one exception is the Codex Colombino, kept by the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

The missionaries who brought the Roman Catholic religion to the Mixtecs set about learning their language and produced several grammars of the Mixtec language, similar in style to Antonio de Nebrija's Gramática Castellana. They also began work on transcribing the Mixtec langages into the Latin alphabet. In recent decades small changes in the alphabetic representation of Mixtec have been put into practice by the Academy of the Mixtec Language. Areas of particular interest include the following:

• The representation of the feature that distinguishes glottalized vowels (or glottal stop, as in some earlier analyses). Some earlier alphabets used h; more commonly today a special kind of apostrophe is used.
• The representation of the high central unrounded vowel. Some earlier alphabets used y; today a barred-i (ɨ) is used.
• The representation of the voiceless velar stop. Most earlier alphabets used c and qu, in line with earlier government policies; today k is more commonly used.
• The representation of tone. Most non-linguistic transcriptions of Mixtec do not fully record the tones. When tone is represented, acute accent over the vowel is typically used to indicate high tone. Mid tone is sometimes indicated with a macron over the vowel, but it may be left unmarked. Low tone is sometimes indicated with a grave accent overt the vowel, but it might be left unmarked, or it might be indicated with an underscore to the vowel.

The alphabet adopted by the Academy of the Mixtec Language and later by the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP), contains the following letters (indicated below with their corresponding phonemes).

One of the main obstacles in establishing an alphabet for the Mixtec language is its status as a vernacular tongue. The social domain of the language is eminently domestic, since federal law requires that all dealings with the state be conducted in Spanish, even though the country's autochthonous languages enjoy the status of "national languages". Few printed materials in Mixtec exist and, up to a few years ago, written literature in the language was practically non-existent. There is little exposure of Mixtec in the media, other than on the CDI's indigenous radio system – XETLA and XEJAM in Oaxaca; XEZV-AM in Guerrero; and XEQIN-AM in Baja California – and a bilingual radio station based in the USA in Los Angeles, California, where a significant Mixtec community can be found.

At the same time, the fragmentation of the Mixtec language and its varieties means that texts published in one variety may be utterly incomprehensible to speakers of another. In addition, most speakers are unaware of the official orthography adopted by the SEP and the Mixtec Academy, and some even doubt that their language can lend itself to a written form.