How Many Languages Are Spoken in Mexico?
This article discusses the age-old question of how many languages are spoken in Mexico? The answer is not an easy one because none of the sources are in agreement about that topic. This article will discuss INALI’S three-tiered approach to Mexico’s languages, as well as the estimates provided by other sources.
How Many Languages Are Spoken in Mexico?
In the 2020 census, 7,364,645 persons 3 years of age or more indicated that they spoke some kind of indigenous language. This represented 6.1% of Mexico’s 120 million citizens.[1] As a country with a centuries-old multilingual tradition, Mexico currently appears to rank fifth among the countries that have the largest number of languages, after New Guinea, Indonesia, Nigeria, and India. But the actual number of languages spoken in Mexico varies depending on the sources consulted, all of which have incongruent calculations.
Ethnologue Estimate
According to Ethnologue – which is published by SIL (The Summer Institute of Linguistics) – there are 7,097 languages in the world. Papua New Guinea ranked first with 841 languages, representing 12% of the world total. Indonesia comes in at second place with 710 languages, and Nigeria is third with 526 languages. According to SIL’s most recent estimate, Mexico is in seventh place with 292 languages.[2]
Mexico’s Living Languages
The Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity) indicates that Mexico’s national linguistic wealth is made up of 291 living languages, compared to the 6,912 languages spoken on the entire planet.[3]
Of the 291 languages spoken in the nation of Mexico, 158 languages are spoken in Oaxaca. Puebla has the second largest number of languages spoken: 29, followed by Chiapas with 25, Veracruz with 23, and Guerrero with 16.
Estimates of the CDI and INEGI
The National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples (CDI-2009) has estimated that the Mexican people speak 62 languages. According to INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía) – known in English as the National Institute of Statistics and Geography – there were 89 designated languages in Mexico’s 2010 census for citizens to choose from. However, in 2020, INEGI appears to have condensed the number of languages on the census questionnaire to 70 languages, with an option for “other language” to be used by citizens when they did not speak one of the seventy languages.
INALI Estimates of Linguistic Variants
The National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI), an institution created by the Mexican government in 2003, created the “Catalogue of National Indigenous Languages: Linguistic Variants of Mexico With Their Self-Denominations and Geostatical References” in 2008. This catalogue created a three-tiered classification as follows:[4]
The First Tier: Familias Lingüísticas (Linguistic Families)
According to INALI, there are 11 linguistic families spoken throughout Mexico. Each family is a set of languages whose similarities in their linguistic and lexical structures are due to a common origin. The language families are found in various parts of the Mexican Nation, as the following map indicates:[5]
The Second Tier: Agrupación Lingüística (Linguistic Group)
The second tier of INALI’s classification are the 68 groups that refer to the historical terms by which each indigenous group has been known, such as Zapotec, Mixtec, Náhuatl, Maya and Otomi. Each of these groups speaks their own native language and has its own unique history. As noted in the illustration from INALI (2009) below, five of the language families contain only one indigenous language. On the other hand, the language family with the most languages was the Maya linguistic group, which consists of 20 languages, nearly all of which are spoken in the southernmost regions of Mexico, especially Chiapas and the three states of the Yucatán Peninsula. Close behind is the Otomanguean family which boasts a total of 18 languages spoken across a wide range of central, eastern, and southern Mexican states.
The Eleven Linguistic Families of Mexico According to INALI
Source: Claudine Chamoreau. Diversidad Lingüística en México. Amerindia, 2014, Amerindia- Langues du Mexique, 37 (1), p. 7.
At the top of the chart, each of the eleven linguistic families are shown, with the ethnic groups within them shown in each column under the family name. On the right side of each cell, the number of linguistic variants for each language group is shown.
The Third Tier: Variantes Lingüísticas (Linguistic Variants)
According to the Catalog of National Indigenous Languages, the 68 language groups are broken down into 364 linguistic variants (variantes lingüísticas) in Mexico. The term linguistic variant is a neutral way of referring to linguistic differences among speakers of the same language.[6] This category is generated from two criteria: (i) a lack of mutual comprehension between users of languages that are structurally and socially distant, but called by the same name; and, (ii) the existence of self-denominations for each of these distanced forms of speech. Previously, the word dialect was used in this context, but this term is no longer used in Mexico.[7]
The differences between variants can be sounds, words, meanings, or uses. For example, the Spanish spoken in Yucatán is not the same as that spoken in Chihuahua, although they are understood; In this case, Spanish is spoken as a language and the variants are spoken by region. However, in some indigenous groups (Mixtec, Zapotec, Mixe, Chinanteco, among others), there are linguistic variants so different that the people who speak those languages cannot understand each other, so each linguistic variant must be treated individually.[8] For many centuries, speakers of these languages have been separated from their linguistic cousins and, over time, their languages diverged and, in many cases, became mutually unintelligible.
The Maya and Otomanguean Languages
The twenty Mayan languages consist of 43 separate variants. But the second largest family, the Otomanguean family, has 18 ethnic languages which are divided into 220 language variants. The largest number of linguistic variants can be found in Oaxaca, where 16 indigenous groups exist, most of which belong to the Otomanguean family.
The Yuto Azteca Languages
The third largest family is the Yuto Azteca (Uto-Aztecan) language family, which includes many native languages also spoken by Native American tribes in the United States. In Mexico, the Uto-Aztecan family consists of eleven languages and 59 linguistic variants.
Of the fifty-nine variants, Náhuatl has 30 variants, remnants of the once dominant Aztec language whose empire, migration patterns, and trading relationships had spread the Náhuatl tongue through many states before the Spanish conquest. After the conquest, the Spaniards would also bring Náhuatl speakers with them in the settlement of the west and the north, further spreading the language’s use and popularity. In the 2020 census, more than 1.6 million people in Mexico still spoke Náhuatl.
The following table shows the indigenous groups that have the largest number of linguistic variants and where those variants are spoken.
Mexico’s Languages in the 2020 Census
Mexico’s 2020 Population and Housing Census was conducted in March 2020. More than 147,000 interviewers traveled the nearly two million square kilometers of the national territory, visiting all Mexican households to obtain information about the demographic, socioeconomic and cultural characteristics of the people of each state. Finally, in January 2021, Mexico proudly became the first country in the world to announce the results of its 2020 census. The censuses of many other countries had to be delayed or postponed because of the COVID Pandemic. The thirty most spoken indigenous languages in Mexico in the year 2020 are shown in the table below.
| The Indigenous Languages with the Largest Number of Linguistic Variants (According to INALI) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No. | Language | Total Persons 3 Years & More Speaking Indigenous Languages | % of Indigenous Speakers 3 Years & More | Monolingual Rate (%) |
| 1 | Náhuatl | 1,651,958 | 22.4% | 6.8% |
| 2 | Maya | 774,755 | 10.5% | 4.3% |
| 3 | Tseltal | 589,144 | 8.0% | 28.4% |
| 4 | Tsotsil | 550,274 | 7.5% | 32.1% |
| 5 | Mixteco | 526,593 | 7.2% | 15.6% |
| 6 | Zapoteco | 490,845 | 6.7% | 6.1% |
| 7 | Otomí | 298,861 | 4.1% | 3.1% |
| 8 | Totonaco | 256,344 | 3.5% | 8.9% |
| 9 | Ch'ol | 254,715 | 3.5% | 15.9% |
| 10 | Mazateco | 237,212 | 3.2% | 12.4% |
| 11 | Huasteco | 168,729 | 2.3% | 3.9% |
| 12 | Mazahua | 153,797 | 2.1% | 1.5% |
| 13 | Tlapaneco | 147,432 | 2.0% | 20.0% |
| 14 | Chinanteco | 144,394 | 2.0% | 7.0% |
| 15 | Tarasco | 142,459 | 1.9% | 5.8% |
| 16 | Mixe | 139,760 | 1.9% | 13.4% |
| 17 | Tarahumara | 91,554 | 1.2% | 11.5% |
| 18 | Zoque | 74,018 | 1.0% | 5.1% |
| 19 | Tojolabal | 66,953 | 0.9% | 15.6% |
| 20 | Chontal de Tabasco | 60,563 | 0.8% | 0.6% |
| 21 | Huichol | 60,263 | 0.8% | 13.5% |
| 22 | Amuzgo | 59,884 | 0.8% | 27.8% |
| 23 | Chatino | 52,076 | 0.7% | 14.4% |
| 24 | Tepehuano del sur | 44,386 | 0.6% | 18.6% |
| 25 | Mayo | 38,507 | 0.5% | 0.7% |
| 26 | Popoluca de la Sierra | 36,113 | 0.5% | 1.8% |
| 27 | Cora | 33,226 | 0.5% | 28.9% |
| 28 | Triqui | 29,545 | 0.4% | 12.8% |
| 29 | Yaqui | 19,376 | 0.3% | 3.0% |
| 30 | Huave | 18,827 | 0.3% | 10.7% |
| Language Not Specified | 22,777 | 0.3% | 1.8% | |
| Other Languages | 129,305 | 1.8% | 3.3% | |
| Total | 7,364,645 | 100.0% | 11.8% | |
| Source: INEGI, Censo de Población y Vivienda 2020: Tabulados del Cuestionario Básico: Población de 3 Años y Más Que Habla Lengua Indígena por Entidad Federativa y Lengua Según Condición de Habla Española y Sexo. | ||||
The Náhuatl language is the most widely spoken language in Mexico. Every state of Mexico has Náhuatl speakers, but in 2020, the largest share lived in Puebla, Veracruz, Hidalgo, Guerrero, and San Luis Potosí. The Maya language is spoken by about three-quarters of a million people, but the states of Yucatán and Quintana Roo have the largest population of Mayans.
The Tseltal and Tsotsil are two languages of Chiapas that have the third and fourth largest populations of indigenous speakers. For both of the languages, Quintana Roo ranks a distant second place as the home for both Tseltal and Tostsil speakers.
Mixteco is the fifth most spoken language of Mexico and is the highest ranked Otomanguean language with large populations living in both Oaxaca and Guerrero. Zapoteco is the sixth most spoken language, also an Otomanguean language, and it is mostly found in Oaxaca.
The Otomí language is the sixth most spoken language in Mexico. This language is spread across many eastern Mexican states but is most abundant in the states of México and Hidalgo, with significant populations also living in Veracruz and Puebla.
Alto Riesgo de Desaparición (High Risk of Disappearance)
In the Twenty-First Century, many of Mexico’s indigenous languages face the threat of extinction. According to INALI, 51 of Mexico’s linguistic variants were classified as having a “muy alto riesgo de desaparición” [very high risk of disappearance], and another 48 variants were considered to have a “alto riesgo de desaparición” [high risk of disappearance].[9]
Indigenous Identity in Mexico (2020 Census)
There is a distinction between those Mexicans who identify as being of indigenous descent (and who possess some aspects of indigenous culture) and those who speak an indigenous language. In the 2020 census, only 6.1% of Mexicans indicated that they spoke an indigenous language, but 19.41% of Mexicans identified themselves as being indigenous.
Although Mexico has deep concerns for the preservation of its indigenous languages, the IWGIA (International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs) has declared that Mexico has the largest population of indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere. In addition, Mexico has the third largest percent of Indigenous people, behind Guatemala and Bolivia, as indicated in the following graphic by Luis Enrique López.[10] It is for this reason that Mexico is proud of its indigenous heritage but is also concerned for the future of some components of that heritage.
Footnotes
[1] INEGI, Censo de Población y Vivienda 2020. Tabulados del Cuestionario Básico: Población de 3 años y más que habla lengua indígena por entidad Federativa y Lengua Según Condición de Habla Española y Sexo.
[2] Dr. Jhonnatan Rangel, “Diversidad Lingüística y Lenguas en Peligro” (Dec. 21, 2020: UIET, Oxolotán, Tabasco) Online: Chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://hal.science/hal-02488830/file/UIET2.pdf.
[3] Gobierno de México Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, “Día Internacional de la Lengua Materna 2022” (Feb. 21, 2022). Online: https://www.gob.mx/semarnat/articulos/dia-internacional-de-la-lengua-materna-2022-295081?idiom=es#:~:text=En%20la%20obra%20Capital%20Natural,6%2C912%20en%20todo%20el%20planeta.
[4] Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas, Catalogo de Las Lenguas Nacionales: Variantes Lingüísticas de Mexico con sus Autodenominaciones y Referencias Geoestadísticas (Jan. 14, 2008). Online:
Chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.inali.gob.mx/pdf/CLIN_completo.pdf.
[5] México Desconocido, “Las Lenguas Indígenas de México, Esencia de Nuestra Identidad: La Familia Lingüística” (June 12, 2023). Online: https://www.mexicodesconocido.com.mx/las-lenguas-indigenas-de-mexico.html.
[6] Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas (INALI), Lenguas Indígenas Nacionales en Riesgo de Desaparición: Variantes Lingüísticas por Grado de Riesgo (2012).
[7] Banco de México, Selección de Lenguas Indígenas Para la Difusión de Información de Billetes y Monedas (Dirección General de Emisión Oficina de Análisis y Estudios de Efectivo (Dec. 2021), pp. 7-8.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas México. Lenguas Indígenas Nacionales en Riesgo de Desaparición: Variantes Lingüísticas por Grado de Riesgo (INALI, 2012), pp. 17-18.
[10]Luis Enrique López, “Reaching the Unreached: Indigenous Intercultural Bilingual Education in Latin America,” Paper Commissioned by the Education for All Global Monitoring Report (2009).