Mexican Zapotec rugs, blankets, weavings
Mexican Zapotec Native American Indian history - page 7 of 7

As of 1995 there were 7.8 million speakers of native languages in Mexico, 8% of the total population. The state of Oaxaca is the most native state of the Mexican republic, in terms of both the total number of indigenous inhabitants as well as the number of aboriginal cultures represented within its borders. There are 289 living aboriginal languages in Mexico; Aztecan, Mayan and Zapotecan are the most widely spoken.

The most widely spoken native language in today's Oaxaca is Zapotec, with approximately 423,000 speakers. The Zapotec language belongs to the greater Otomanguean language group. Of the 173 living Otomanguean tongues, 64 are Zapotecan. These are subsequently divided into three geographic subgroups within the state of Oaxaca: Northern, Southern and Isthmus Zapotec, with a slight overlap into the neighboring states of Chiapas and Veracruz.

Zapotec is a tonal language rich in sound and pronunciation. Because the set of sounds used to speak Zapotec is greater than for European languages, it is difficult to capture it accurately with the standard roman alphabet. This was a problem for Spanish friars in the 16th century, when they began writing zapotec catechisms and composing grammars and vocabularies of the language.

Current theories suggest that 10,000 years before the present, Paleo-Indian inhabitants of the region shared a single language. As population groups began to settle and differentiate along regional lines, likewise their speech began to diverge. Sometime between 10 and 7 thousand past, three great language families had differentiated: the northern Uto-Aztecan group, the southern Mayan group, and the central proto-Otomanguean group. The central proto-Otomanguean group extended from the present Mexican state of Hidalgo to the southern extent of today's Oaxaca.

In succeeding millennia, various branches continued to diverge within each language group, and within Otomanguean the most important branches were the Otomí-Pame, Chocho-Popoloca-Mazateco, Mixe-Zoque and Mixtec-Zapotec. A key linguistic fission seems to have occurred around 5,700 ago, when Mixtec and Zapotec began to diverge. These glotochronological estimates are corroborated by the available archaeological data for each of these peoples. For example, glotochronological analyses indicate, and archaeology corroborates, a great atomization of Zapotec culture following the initiation of the long period of decay of the great capital at Monte Albán. Simultaneously with this event, which began in the eighth century of the common era, a number of dialectical variants of Zapotec appeared in the mountain regions surrounding the central valley of Oaxaca.

While it is clear that today's Zapotecan languages share commonalities with one another and with an ancestral language; as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Roman and Romanian with Latin, the Zapotec languages are largely unintelligible to native speakers of the other tongues. However, in Zapotec languages, as in Romance languages, one of the most highly preserved areas of commonality is the numbering system. Although an Isthmus and a Mountain Zapotec could hardly converse with one another in their own dialects, since their languages diverged from Valley Zapotec 8 centuries ago and have not interacted significantly since, they would each recognize one another's numbers.

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• Mexican Zapotec history
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Mexican Zapotec Native American Indian history - page 1

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