Huave language

The language is spoken in four villages on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the southeast of the state, by around 20,000 people (see table below).

Constenla Umaña (1994) suggests that Huave may have been the language of the Tacacho, a group that lived in a town called Yacacoyaua located in Maribio territory in sixteenth-century Nicaragua.

The term "Huave" is thought to come from the Zapotec languages, meaning "people who rot in the humidity", according to the 17th-century Spanish historian Burgoa.

An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)[3] found lexical similarities among Huave, Totozoquean, and Chitimacha.

However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the similarities could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.

[7] Huave of San Mateo del Mar is partly tonal, distinguishing between high and low tone in penultimate syllables only.

[9] Huave is similar to the Mayan languages in being both morphologically and syntactically ergative and consistently head-marking.

There are other purpose clauses introduced by more ordinary particles in which the verb is inflected for a special subordinate mode.

The most vibrant speech community is in San Mateo del Mar which was fairly isolated until recently.

There is an effort going on by the Mexican INALI (National Institute for Indigenous Languages) to standardize the orthography together with speakers from all four communities.