Grammatical sketch of Zacatepec Chatino

Chatino is an Oto-Manguean language, part of the Zapotecan family. Zacatapec Chatino is spoken in the small community of San Marcos Zacatepec in the State of Oaxaca, Mexico. It is a conservative variety of Chatino, as it conserves the penultimate syllables of disyllabic roots. Nowadays, Zacatepec Chatino is only spoken by community members above 35 years of age and is considered a moribund language. Its phonology presents us with sixteen vowel rimes (oral, nasal, glottalized and nasalized, and glottalized), lamino-alveolar sounds, and a large inventory of tones (8 tone categories). Syntactically, it is a VSO language, although other word orders are acceptable, depending on pragmatic motivations.