It is believed to have been the second language to branch off from the others within the Popolocan subgroup, though there is a small debate over the relation it has to them.

[2] According to the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, there were only 8 speakers of the language in 2008.

[1] The small number of current speakers is the result of a steady decline over the last 60 years, which can be attributed to anti-illiteracy campaigns by the Mexican government that discouraged the use of indigenous languages, migration from the area to the cities, and the small initial population of speakers of the language.

[5] Despite the lack of historical documentation in Ixcatec, written speech has been observed to use Latin script following the arrival of the Spaniards.

[6] The earliest document written in Ixcatec is from 1939, when native speaker Doroteo Jiménez wrote a letter to Lázaro Cárdenas, the president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940.

The closest languages to Ixcatec, genetically speaking, are Mazatec, Chocholtec and Popolocan.

Due to the low number of speakers, Ixcatec is considered a language with a high risk of disappearing.

The voiceless bilabial stop /p/ and the trill /rr/ are the only consonants to be borrowed from Spanish (though there is only one case in which /p/ possibly was not: ʔu2ča1pi1 [ʔu2ša1pi1] ‘cenzontle’.

The following table presents the pairs of vowels with the oral one preceding the nasalized version.

Diphthongs generally appear in inflectional forms of stems ending in /i/ or /u/, or their nasalized versions, and are represented with one tone.

The initial consonant can also be the voiceless glottal stop, /ʔ/, but it does not occur when it directly precedes a vowel.

The stress is clearly shown in the inflected forms, where it is displaced as a result of suffixing a syllable of the CVT type.

However, in the form ra2te3ni1 ‘our sandals’, the stress moves towards the penultimate syllable where it is expressed by lengthening the consonant /n/: [ra2te3nni1].

[20] When there is a vowel /i/ in the last two syllables of a disyllabic or trisyllabic noun, and the possessive suffixes of the second and third persons are added, the final /i/ becomes lowered and centralized.

[21] Regressive assimilation occurs in disyllabic words that have an /a/ in each syllable separated by the glottal stop /ʔ/.

The first component is generally a morpheme that classifies the noun in one of various generic classes, which includes trees, animals, flowers, people, etc.

Nouns express the person of a possessor by adding to their subjects specific suffixes and enclitics.

The endings of nouns in this class generate a high tone in the final vowel of the word.

These conserve the medium tone in all inflectional forms and include monosyllabic as well as multisyllabic names.

[28] The endings are:[28] Nouns in this class share certain irregularities in their inflected forms that reveal paradigm shifts by analogy with Subclass IIa.

The endings are:[29] Borrowed terms indicate the person of the possessor with the morphemes of the Ixcatec system.

The type of accent that nouns receive in Spanish pronunciation, flat or acute, is diagnostic for its possessed forms in Ixcatec.

The absolute noun expresses number through lexical means with the use of numerals or other adjectives indicating quantity.

An adverb, a demonstrative, or the particle la2 can be inserted between a noun and a qualifying noun:[35] šu2wa3gourdti1ye1blackšu2wa3 ti1ye1gourd black‘black gourd’ya2basketš2thatrii2bigšhe1 ya2 š2 rii2 šhe1basket that big‘that big basket’ Mismatch in the number of words between lines: 4 word(s) in line 1, 3 word(s) in line 2 (help);A noun that expresses possession is repeated before an adjective or replaced by the particle la2: [36] šhu3ni1our.cavešhu3cavešhe1bigšhu3ni1 šhu3 šhe1our.cave cave big‘our big cave’šhua1ni2our.Languagela2PTCLšhũ1beautifulšhua1ni2 la2 šhũ1our.Language PTCL beautiful‘our beautiful language’An adjective in predicative function goes before the noun:[36] ť̌ʔui1cleanʔnee1his/her.clothesť̌ʔui1 ʔnee1clean his/her.clothes‘his/her clothes are clean’The suffix of negation -ʔa2na1 follows a predicated adjective, but precedes the enclitic for grammatical person:[37] The definite article sa1 or sa2 is rarely used and less so when the determination is ambiguous.

They indicate the gender of this noun in third-person forms of the possessive, verb, or the personal pronoun su2wa2.

[43] Verbs can be inflected for grammatical persons and number by means of suffixes attached to stem words.