The Mazatecan languages are a group of closely related indigenous languages spoken by some 200,000 people in the area known as the Sierra Mazateca, which is 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.
In that branch, they belong to the Popolocan subgroup, together with the Popoloca, Ixcatec and Chocho languages.
[3] In 1892 he second-guessed his own previous classification and suggested that Mazatec was related to Chiapanec-Mangue and Chibcha.
Weitlaner's student, María Teresa Fernandez de Miranda, was the first to propose reconstruction of the Popolocan languages.
She next reconstructed what she called Proto-Popolocan-Mazatecan (Gudschinsky 1959) (it was referred to as Popotecan, but this term was not widely adopted.)
They are named after the villages where they are commonly spoken (with the exception of Puebla Mazatec): Studies of mutual intelligibility between Mazatec-speaking communities revealed that most are relatively close but distinct enough that literacy programs must recognize local standards.
The San Miguel Huautla dialect occupies an intermediary position, sharing traits with both groups.
The dialect of Huautla de Jiménez then changed sequences of /*tʲh/ to *ʃ before short vowels, and the dialect of Santa Maria Jiotes merged the labialized velar stop kʷ to k.[2] Chiquihuitlán [maq] San Mateo Huautla [mau], Eloxochitlán [maa], Tecóatl [maa], Ayautla [vmy], Coatzospan Huautla de Jiménez [mau], Jiotes San Miguel Hualtepec [mau] Jalapa [maj], Mazatlán [vmz] Ixcatlán [mzi], Soyaltepec [vmp] Like many other Oto-Manguean languages, Mazatecan languages have complex phonologies characterized by complex tone systems and several uncommon phonation phenomena such as creaky voice, breathy voice and ballistic syllables.
The following review of a Mazatecan phoneme inventory will be based on the description of the Jalapa de Díaz variety published by Silverman, Blankenship et al. (1995).
To give an overview of the phonological variety among Mazatecan languages, it is presented here and compared to the earlier description of Chiquihuitlán Mazatec published by the SIL linguist A. R. Jamieson, in 1977, which is not based on modern acoustic analysis and relies on a much more dated phonological theory and so it should be regarded as a tentative account.
Additional vowels distinguish oral, nasal, breathy and creaky phonation types.
[16][17] In Chiquihutlán Mazatec, verb stems are of the shape CV (consonant+vowel) and are always inflected with a stem-forming prefix marking person and number of the subject and aspect.
Number is not expressed by free pronouns or noun phrases if it is directly retrievable from context.
Women, on the other hand, do not generally use whistle speech, just as older males use it more rarely than younger ones.
Since whistle speech does not encode precise information about vowel or consonants, it is often ambiguous with several possible meanings.
However, since most whistling treats a limited number of topics, it is normally unproblematic to disambiguate meaning through context.
[20] Mazatecan-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio station XEOJN, based in San Lucas Ojitlán, Oaxaca.
A wide variety of Bible-based literature and video content is published in Mazatec by Jehovah's Witnesses.