Highland Chatino
Highland Chatino is an indigenous Mesoamerican language, one of the Chatino family of the Oto-Manguean languages. Dialects are rather diverse; "Ethnologue" 16 counts them as three languages as follows: Neighboring dialects between the three groups are about 80% mutually intelligible; diversity among the three Western dialects is almost as great. For phonological and grammatical details, see Chatino languages, which includes examples from Yaitepec dialect. Phonology. Zacatepec Chatino. There are nine vowel sounds both oral and nasal: Yaitepec Chatino. Yaitepec Chatino has the following phonemic consonants (Rasch 2002): Rasch (2002) reports ten distinct tones for Yaitepec Chatino. , mid  , low-mid , and low . There are also two rising tones (/˦˥/ and /˨˦/) and three falling tones (, , ) as well as a more limited falling tone , found in a few lexical items and in a few Completive forms of verbs. Orthography. There are a variety of practical orthographies for Chatino, most based on Spanish orthography. Typically, = , = , and is spelled before back vowels and before front vowels. In Quiahije Chatino, and perhaps more broadly across Highland Chatino, superscript capitals A–L are used as tone letters: .