Chatino language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chatino
Cha'tña
Spoken in: Mexico 
Region: Oaxaca
Total speakers: <23,000
Language family: American
 Oto-Manguean (MP)
  Zapotecan
   Chatino
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2:
ISO 639-3: ctp

The Chatino language is an indigenous Mesoamerican language, which is classified under the Zapotecan branch of the Oto-Manguean language family. The language is natively spoken by approximately 23,000 of the Chatino indigenous people, whose communities are located in the southern portion of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico.

The Chatino have close cultural and linguistic ties with the Zapotec peoples, whose Zapotec language is the other member of the Zapotecan languages.

[edit] Dialects

Ethnologue counts some seven distinct dialects of Chatino, which exhibit varying degrees of mutual intelligibility:

  1. Chatino (Chatino de la Zona Alta Occidental) [CTP]
  2. Chatino de Lachao-Yolotepec [CLY]
  3. Chatino de Nopala (Chatino de la Zona Alta Oriental) [CYA]
  4. Chatino de Tataltepec (Chatino de la Zona Baja) [CTA]
  5. Chatino de Yaitepec [CUC]
  6. Chatino de Zacatepec (Chatino de San Marcos Zacatepec) [CTZ]
  7. Chatino de Zenzontepec (Chatino del Norte) [CZE]

[edit] External link