Documentation and description of Tù'un Na Ñuu Sá Matxí Ntxè'è (San Martín Duraznos Mixtec)

Dec 12, 2023 · 2 min read
The village of San Martín Duraznos and its surroundings. (Photo by Sandra Auderset, January 2020)
research

Since 2018 I’ve been working on the documentation and description of the Mixtec variety spoken in San Martín Duraznos and surrounding towns and rancherías (including: Rio de Hielo, Santo Niño Yucuyi, San Marcos Xinicuesta, Guadalupe Nundaca), as well as in diaspora communities in northern Mexico and the United States. In collaboration with Carmen Hernández Martínez, language activist and interpreter living in Oxnard, California, we started out working with the diaspora community there. In 2019, I received a Small Grant from ELDP that allowed us to take our work to San Martín Duraznos (Oaxaca, Mexico). This ongoing collaboration with the community of origin has resulted in a audio-visual corpus of naturalistic speech of 27h, of which about half are transcribed and translated. Based on this corpus, we created various community materials for learning and maintaining the language and bridging the gap between speakers in the diaspora and in the village of origin. Since 2025, I also work in the neighboring village of Guadalupe Nundaca, where they speak a similar, but not identical variety of Mixtec.

Resources on the web:

  • ELAR deposit (audio-video corpus of naturalistic speech)
  • Let’s learn Mixteco website - a community-oriented bilingual website with language learning materials, games and exercises for learning and practicing San Martín Duraznos Mixtec
  • Let’s learn Mixteco facebook page (managed by Carmen Hernández Martínez) - follow us for memes, videos, word of the day, and more in San Martín Duraznos Mixtec
  • online talking dictionary (Mixtec-Spanish-English) - in progress!

Resources for download:

  • reading and writing booklet (in Spanish) explaining the practical orthography - download the booklet
  • overview of tone and its uses in the lexicon and grammar (in Spanish) - download the slides
  • preliminary analysis of verbal inflection (in Spanish)

Timeline:

  • Fall 2017 - Spring 2018: field methods class at UCSB
  • 2019-2022: ELDP Small Grant
  • Dec 2019/Jan 2020: Trip #1 to San Martín Duraznos
  • Oct-Dec 2021: Trip #2 to San Martín Duraznos
  • 2022: ELAR deposit online
  • April 2023: Trip #3 to San Martín Duraznos
  • February 2025: Trip to Guadalupe Nundaca
Sandra Auderset
Authors
Sandra Auderset (she/her)
Postdoctoral Researcher in Linguistics

I research how languages diversify over time and how we can trace and explain diversification. I work on tone and sound change, subgrouping, and person marking, with a focus on Mixtecan (Mexico). I combine quantitative methods and data-driven comparison with detailed analyses of individual varieties. To develop the empirical foundations needed, I conduct long-term fieldwork on Mixtec and Cuicatec varieties and develop openly available cross-linguistic resources.

I’m currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Bern. I have a PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA) and the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany). My dissertation is a collection of three articles on Mixtec(an) language history using qualitative and quantitative methods.

News and updates:

  • I got a Firebird Research Grant for continuing the documentation of Santos Reyes Pápalo Cuicatec
  • November 2026: I will give a talk at the Transalpine Typology Meeting in Munich on Mixtec pronouns and classifiers
  • August 2026: Co-hosted a workshop on Microtypology at SLE with Linda Konnerth and Sergey Say
  • July 2026: I contributed to a position paper on language documentation infrastructure (/publication/gessler-2026-the-missing)
  • April 2026: New database paper out in Journal of Open Humanities Data