These pages give some detail on the language spoken among the Mazatec people of Oaxaca, Mexico. The intention here is to give a general impression of the language for those interested in Mazatec culture and to enrich their knowledge of the lives of the people who discovered and propagated the entheogens for which they are justly famous.
There is a clear gap across the internet for accessible (ie: non technical) information on the Mazatec languages and I hope that this site will be able to provide such details to a wider audience. I have generally tried to follow the native Mazatec spelling of words as this seems to express the various nasal, breathy and laryngeal sounds at the most instinctive level, and as such have most often used the system proposed by Carole Jamieson Capen in her works on Chiquihuitlan Mazatec.
It has to be said that there is an argument in favour of dividing the various dialects of Mazatecs spoken in villages and towns across Oaxaca into separate languages and as such there is no single 'Mazatec language' as such but a range of perhaps six or seven 'Mazatec languages' plural. The Ethnologue lists eight varieties: those of Ayautla, Chiquihuitlan, Huautla, Ixcatlan, Jalapa de Diaz, Mazatlan, San Jeronimo (Eloxochitlan) and Soyaltepec. However with the exception of perhaps the dialects of Chiquihuitlan, Soyaltepec and Jalapa de Diaz, most of them are to a greater degree mutually intelligible, so perhaps we can speak of a main Mazatec language with some widely divergent dialects.
Information on Mazatec is generally difficult to come by, and as such I have included information only on two varieties - the very divergent Chiquihuitlan dialect and the more standard Eloxochitlan or San Jeronimo dialect. Please click on the links below.
An introduction to the Mazatec and their languages
Pronunciation & Short Poem - Grammar - Wordlist
Also known as San Jeronimo Mazatec
Pronunciation - Phrases - Numbers - Wordlist
Numbers in various other Mazatec dialects
See also: Chjine - A Mazatec Concept Of Practicality in the Words section
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