Texistepec Popoluca

Texistepec Popoluca also called Texistepec Zoque is a Mixe–Zoquean language of the Zoquean branch spoken by around 400 indigenous Popoluca people in and around the town of Texistepec in Southern Veracruz, Mexico.

Within the Mixe–Zoquean family, Texistepec Popoluca is most closely related to Sierra Popoluca.

Texistepec Popoluca has been documented primarily in work by Søren Wichmann, a Danish anthropological and historical linguist and Ehren Reilly, a former graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. Reilly's work was a part of the larger Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica, under the leadership of the University of Pittsburgh's Terrence Kaufman, and contributed to Kaufman's project of deciphering Epi-Olmec writing.

Less than 100 native speakers of Texistepec Popoluca remained when Søren Wichmann, Ehren Reilly, and Terrence Kaufman conducted their research between 1990 and 2002, and the language was moribund, with no new speakers acquiring the language natively, due to the prevalence of Spanish. Today, all remaining speakers, are elderly, if any survive at all.

References

Wichmann, Søren. 1994. Underspecification in Texistepec Popoluca phonology. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 27.2: 267-285.

Reilly, Ehren. 2002. A Survey of Texistepec Popoluca Verbal Morphology. Unpublished undergraduate thesis. Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota

Reilly, Ehren. 2004. Promiscuous Paradigms and the Morphologically Conditioned "Ergative Split" in Texistepec Popoluca (Zoquean). Proceedings of Berkeley Linguistics Society 30, Special Session on the Morphology of Native American Languages. February, 2004.