The Mixe region within the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico

The Mixe languages are languages of the Mixean branch of the Mixe-Zoquean language family indigenous to southern Mexico. The languages of this branch that are spoken in Oaxaca are called Mixe while their relatives in Veracruz are called Popoluca. The other languages of the Mixean branch are Olutec Mixe and Sayultec Mixe both also called Popoluca and the extinct language Tapachultec. This article is about the Oaxaca Mixean languages.

Mixe is spoken in the Sierra Mixe of eastern Oaxaca by around 188,000 indigenous Mixe people. The Mixe themselves call their language Ayuujk, Ayüük or Ayuhk.

The Mixe languages of Oaxaca can be subdivided into three dialect areas: Highland Mixe (northern Highland spoken around Totontepec and Southern Highland spoken around Tlahuitoltepec, Ayutla and Tamazulapan), Midland Mixe (spoken around Juquila and Zacatepec) and Lowland Mixe (spoken around Guichicovi).

Phonology of Mixe

Mixe phonology is complicated and not very well documented or analysed presently. Uncommon features include palatalised series of all consonant phonemes and possibly a fortis/lenis distinction in the stop series, the recognition of which however is obscured by a tendency of allophonic voicing of consonants in voiced environments. Most descriptions report three contrastive vowel lengths. Syllable nuclei are notoriously complex in Mixe and apart from the three lengths they can consist of one of two kinds of glottalization or aspiration; these vowel qualities are sometimes described as checked vowels, creaky voice vowels and breathy voice vowels.

Some Mixe variants are vowel innovative and some, notably North Highland Mixe, have complicated umlaut systems raising vowel qualities in certain phonological environments.

Orthography

The practical orthographies developed for Mixe

Grammar of Mixe

The Verb

The Mixe verb is complex and inflects for many categories and also shows a lot of derivational morphology. It makes a basic distinction between verbs of dependent and independent clauses the two kinds of verbs take different sets of affixes and also show ablaut in the stem. The morphosyntactic alignment of Mixe is ergative and it also has an obviative system which serves to distinguish between verb participants in reference to its direct/inverse system. While basically a polysynthetic, agglutinative language Mixe only marks one argument on the verb: either the object or the subject of the verb depending on whether the verb is in the direct or inverse form. Mixe shows a wide variety of possibilities for noun incorporation.

The Noun

The Mixe noun does not normally inflect, only animate human nouns inflect for plural, but compound nouns are common, and a lot of derivational morphology allows for creation of new nouns with different meanings both from verbs and other nouns.

Syntax

Mixe is a SOV language with prepositions and genitives before the noun heads and relativ clauses after their noun head.

Text example of Mixe

The example below is from lowland or Guichicovi Mixe and comes from Dieterman, 1995 pg. 110.

Mixe

Mixe-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio station XEGLO, based in Guelatao de Juárez, Oaxaca.

External links

• Online resources for Mixe of Chuxnabán (Midlands) by Carmen Jany
• Bachillerato bilingüe Mixe de Tlahuitoltepec

References

• Dieterman, Julia Irene, 1995, Participant reference in Isthmus Mixe Narrative Discourse, MA. Thesis in linguistics presented to the Faculty of the Graduate school of the University of Texas at Arlington.

• Hoogshagen, Searle & Hilda Halloran Hoogshagen, 1993, Diccionario Mixe de Coatlán, Serie de Vocabularios Indigénas "Mariano Silva y Aceves" Num. 32. SIL, Mexico, D.F.

• Schoenhals, Alvin & Louise Schoenhals, 1965, Vocabulario Mixe de Totontepec, Serie de Vocabularios Indigénas "Mariano Silva y Aceves" Num. 14. SIL, Mexico, D.F.

• Wichmann, Sřren, 1995, The Relationship Among the Mixe-Zoquean Languages of Mexico. University of Utah Press. Salt Lake City. ISBN 0-87480-487-6

es:Idioma mixe