So far as is known, the last speaker of Tepecano was Lino de la Rosa (born September 22, 1895), who was still living as of February 1980.

[2] Research on Tepecano was first carried out by the American linguistic anthropologist John Alden Mason in Azqueltán from 1911 to 1913.

This work led to the publication of a monographic grammatical sketch in 1916 as well as an article on native prayers in Tepecano that Mason had collected from informants in 1918.

Later field-research was conducted by American linguist Dennis Holt in 1965 and from 1979 to 80, but none of his results have so far been published.

[3] Tepecano is an agglutinative language, where words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several morphemes strung together.