432 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
who remained became the Chiapanecs; those who continued on to Nicaragua became
the Mangues (on this migration, see Chapter 2). They must have left from the gen-
eral vicinity of the Tlapanecs, linguistically their closest relatives. In fact, the Mangues
were called “Chorotegas” (i.e., Cholultecas), and Terrence Kaufman proposes that
they were the Early Classic inhabitants of Cholula. The closest linguistic relative of
Sutiaba (in Nicaragua) is the Tlapanec language of western Mexico.
Nahua is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan family, the only one of that family to enter
the Mesoamerican world. Its presence is the result of intrusion into the region, and
it has been noted before that several characteristics of Nahuatl have been acquired
through contact with other Mesoamerican languages (see Box 11.6). In fact, Nahu-
atl has spread into pockets throughout Mesoamerica, where they live among ancient
language groupings of long standing; this pattern also reflects a recent radiation of
Nahua peoples.
The area occupied by Zoquean languages at the arrival of the Spanish almost to-
tally contains the Olmec heartland (on the Olmecs, see Chapter 1); Zoquean ex-
tends farther south in Chiapas, where heavily used trading routes linked Olmec sites
with Pacific coast resources, as well as farther west into Oaxaca (probably as relative
newcomers to the area). This area is broader than the spotty distribution of epi-
Olmec texts, written in an ancestor of all Zoquean languages, but these texts verify
the antiquity of this general distribution of the Zoquean languages by having sur-
faced near the extremes of the recent distribution of this subgroup in the north-
western part of the Gulf lowland heartland of the Olmecs, and in the south at Chiapa
de Corzo in highland Chiapas. Further evidence for a Zoquean occupation of this
general area is the borrowing of a great deal of Mixe-Zoquean vocabulary into neigh-
boring cultures, almost all of it Zoquean (see the following discussion of Language
Contact). Zoquean speakers, then, were the dominant cultural force in the region,
and there is no straightforward alternative to Zoqueans as the bearers of the Olmec
tradition and its descendants throughout this area.
Mixean languages are found on opposite sides of Zoquean territory, with
Tapachultec (now extinct) to its southeast and the rest of Mixean languages to its
southwest. Two Mixean languages are spoken in what is otherwise Gulf Zoquean ter-
ritory in southern Veracruz, one of them in Sayula and one in Oluta, very near the
old Olmec capital of San Lorenzo. In spite of the complexity of the distribution of
Mixean, it basically lies to the south of the primary area of Zoquean speech. A Mix-
ean intrusion into southern Veracruz must be relatively late, after the breakup of
Mixean into different subgroups, since the language of Sayula is more closely related
to the various forms of Mixe than to the language of Oluta.Language Contact
It was noted in earlier sections that the diffusion of linguistic features from one lan-
guage to another results from social interaction. One of the most obvious ways that
one language influences another is through the diffusion of vocabulary. Names of an-
imals and plants have often been borrowed by people entering an ecological zone
from people already living there. For example, the Totonac language includes many
loan words from Huastecan for plants and animals native to the central Veracruz