Chiquihuitlán Mazatec


Chiquihuitlán is the most divergent variety of Mazatec, less than 50% intelligible with Huautla, the prestige variety, and even less intelligible with other Mazatecan languages.

Language revitalization

There has been an undergoing effort to gather as much information about the language as possible. Usually the group of people that speak this language is relatively small, and are forced to leave their native language and adopt the language with the greatest possibility of communication. An effort to help people keep their native language while learning Spanish are those undergone by teacher Gloria Ruiz de Bravo Abuja that created the institution Instituto de Investigación e Integración Social del Estado de Oaxaca en 1969. Another program is Archivo de lenguas indígenas del estate de Oaxaca which publishes promising findings in a series of linguistic schemes.