Dí'z Te
El zapoteco miahuateco
Miahuatec Zapotec
Info about the San Agustín Mixtepec variety
Info about the San Bartolomé Loxicha variety (in the near future)
Scroll down for more general information
The Miahuatlán river, where Pitio went after attacking Spanish-occupied
Miahuatlán in 1539.
Miahuatec is a subgroup of Southern Zapotec which contains at least two distinct languages: San Bartolo Yautepec Zapotec (a distant, pre-Columbian military outpost that the Miahuatecs established in territory seized from the Chontales) and Miahuatec Zapotec proper. The latter is a dialect continuum which consists of at least five significantly different dialects (most with subvarieties) which might be considered emergent languages.
Of these emergent languages, the variety of San Agustín Mixtepec is the most endangered, with only one fluent speaker remaining in the town itself and a handful more scattered at different locations around the state of Oaxaca. I have been working with this variety since 2002. Compared with some other varieties of Miahuatec SAM differs in having two contrastive types of glottalization, marginally contrastive vowel length, and some lexical and perhaps other types of diffusion from neighboring Chontal and Cisyautepecan languages.
San Agustín Loxicha was purportedly founded by people from San Agustín Mixtepec during the colonial period (probably around 1600). Both towns conserve variants of a story about each town's patron saint statue being exchanged for that of the other town at some point. SAL differs from other Miahuatec varieties by a recent (post-1880) change which converted word-final th (from Proto-Zapotec *tt) into j, a velar fricative. Virtually the same as the variety of San Agustín Loxicha proper are subsidiary and nearby towns including San Vicente Yogondoy, Candelaria Loxicha, Buena Vista Loxicha, Quelové Loxicha, Cozoaltepec, and Santo Domingo de Morelos. Most towns with "Loxicha" in their name are included with the notable exceptions of San Bartolomé Loxicha (a significantly different variety of Miahuatec), and the towns of San Baltazar, Santa Catarina, and Santa Marta Loxicha, which belong to the Coatec group. I have worked with four subvarieties of this dialect off and on since 1997, though not extensively.
Like San Agustín Loxicha, nearby San Bartolomé Loxicha was founded approximately 4 centuries ago by Miahuatec speakers who moved south. Small pox and other epidemics together with the effects of the Spanish congregaciones had significantly descreased the local population of the Loxicha region, opening it up for the subsequent Miahuatec migration. Miahuatecs came from different communities in and around Miahuatlán. While San Agustín Loxicha was purportedly founded by former residents of San Agustín Mixtepec, San Bartolomé Loxicha is said to have been founded by people from Zimatlán Viralonga, a place "near Miahuatlán" which no longer exists. This different provenance of the local populations is an important factor in explaining the linguistic diversity in the Loxichas today. Speakers from San Agustín and San Bartolomé have difficulty understanding each other. This varies from person to person because some people have had more exposure to the other dialect. It also appears that it is somewhat easier for speakers from San Bartolomé to understand speakers from San Agustín than the other way around. The San Bartolomé dialect is segmentally (though not tonally) conservative and this is probably a significant factor here. It may be easier for speakers with g and th to unravel the speech of those with y and j than for speakers whose variety has undergone the sound changes to decipher the more conservative pronunciation. Perhaps more crucial though is the sociolinguistic situation. The SAL dialect boasts more speakers, in more towns, and while speakers from San Bartolomé have regular contact with the SAL dialect when they go to market in SAL, the reverse is not true. When I have played recorded texts from San Agustín Mixtepec for speakers of both Loxicha varieties of Miahuatec, both found it easy to understand. Interestingly, a speaker from San Agustín Loxicha told me that she found these recorded texts easier to understand than the speech of those from nearby San Bartolomé. The San Bartolomé Loxicha variety of Miahuatec has also been influenced by a steady stream of immigration from Santa Lucía Miahuatlán for a century or more. There are sociolinguistic differences between families with a historical connection to that town and those without such a connection, including a conservative rising tone for certain lexical items which have changed to a low tone pronunciation in the standard dialect of the town. The San Bartolomé Loxicha variety shows interesting tonal differences from the other varieties of Miahuatec, e.g. rising tone has here been truncated to simple low tone. What sounds the same as (and lexically corresponds to) "low" tone in other varieties of Miahuatec as well as some varieties of Coatec, is here better analyzed as a falling tone, since it contrasts with a low level tone. Thus, there are verbs which in other varieties have "low" (phonetically mid-to-low falling) tone and take a rising tone in the potential aspect or with a first person singular subject with a floating high tone common in Zapotec languages from different regions and subgroups. In San Bartolomé these same verbs will have "falling" tone through most of the paradigm, though this sounds exactly the same as the "low" tone of other varieties, and in the potential or with a first person subject will have a level low tone, rather than a rising tone. This variety of Miahuatec is like the northern dialects of neighboring Coatec as well as Chatino (located a relatively short distance to the west) in marking the first person with vowel nasalization. The Loxichas in general are culturally conservative, conserving the Zapotec ritual calendar as well as other cultural traits. This variety is the current focus of my research efforts.
Most (but not all) of the towns named Ozolotepec also speak a variety of Miahuatec. This area was seized from the Chontales, with some Chontal-speakers being incorporated into the new Zapotec-speaking society, probably one to two centuries before the Spanish conquest. Thus, Ozolotepec separated from Miahuatlán at an earlier date than the Loxichas. Indeed, speakers from the Loxichas are better able to understand towns closer to Miahuatlán such as Cuixtla, Xitla, and San Agustín Mixtepec than they can the speech of the geographically closer Ozolotepec variety. Also included in the Ozolotepec variety are towns like San Andrés Paxtlán, San Mateo Piñas, and San Sebastián Río Hondo. I have only a passing familiarity with this variety, having worked with speakers from San Sebastián Río Hondo once in 1997 and with speakers from San Marcial Ozolotepec once in 2005. It is a beautiful language which I hope to learn more about in the coming years.
The variety of Miahuatec that is spoken the closest to Miahuatlán itself is spoken in the towns of Santa Catarina Cuixtla (where it is endangered), Santa Cruz Xitla, and San Miguel Yogovana. Varieties spoken in other towns like Tamazulapan and Santa Lucía Miahuatlán are probably closest to this variety. I have worked briefly with speakers from Cuixtla and Xitla on several occasions, but never extensively.
My current research is aimed at producing a grammatical description of Miahuatec, focusing on the variety of San Bartolomé Loxicha. I am also working on comparative topics including the historical changes affecting the suprasegmental systems of Miahuatec and Coatec varieties. In the future I would like to work more extensively with all varieties of Miahuatec, and to produce a comparative grammar that takes dialectal variation into account in a significant way.