Introduction

The Copala Triqui language and its relationships

The Copala Triqui language is spoken by 25,000-30,000 people.

It originally comes from the area around San Juan Copala, Oaxaca.   Because of the migration of Copala Triqui people, it is now spoken in other parts of Oaxaca and Mexico, as well as in parts of the United States.

Copala Triqui belongs to the the Triqui family of languages, along with two other Triqui languages -- Chicahuaxtla Triqui and Itunyoso Triqui.  The Triqui languages, the Cuicatec languages, and the Mixtec languages all form a large language family called the Mixtecan family of languages.

Mixtecan is more distantly related to other languages, such as Zapotec, Chinantec, and Mazatec in a family called Oto-Manguean.

About this dictionary project

This dictionary project is the product of the Albany Triqui Working Group, which is a collaboration between members of the Copala Triqui community of the Albany, NY area and faculty and students of the Department of Anthropology at the University at Albany, State University of New York and the Department of Anthropology, University of Florida.

Current and past members of our working group are listed below

Members of the Triqui community:

  • Román Vidal López,  Principal Language Consultant
  • Mónica de Jesús Ramírez
  • Albino Fuentes
  • Irma Fuentes
  • Jesús Fuentes
  • José Fuentes
  • Casimiro de Jesus
  • Cayetano Santos

Linguists and anthropologists

  • Faculty
  • Graduate students
    • Michael Stoop (Florida grad student)
    • Rebecca Dinkel (Albany grad student)
    • Alessio Fasullo (Albany grad student)
    • Jamilläh Rodriguez (Albany grad student)
    • Kosuke Matsukawa, Ph.D. (Albany alumnus)
    • Ruth Scipione Kassel, Ph.D. (Albany alumnus)
    • Edgar Martin del Campo, Ph. D. (Albany alumnus)
    • Ashley LaBoda, Ph.D. (Albany alumnus)
    • Sharone Horowit-Hendler (Albany alumnus)
  • Undergraduates
    • Susan Perdomo (Albany alumnus)
    • Gabriela Dehesa Aquino (Albany alumnus)
    • Rojay Ragbeer (Albany alumnus)
    • Zena Zimmerglass (Albany alumnus)
    • Samantha Lefavour (Albany alumnus)
    • Julian Rauter (summer intern)

Previous work on Copala Triqui

This dictionary owes an enormous debt to the pioneering work of Barbara Hollenbach, and her dictionary which is available at https://www-01.sil.org/~hollenbachb/Posted.htm  The Hollenbach dictionary primarily records the speech of Copala Triqui people in the 1960s and 1970s.

This dictionary intends to build on the solid foundation of that work by

  • introducing many examples from contemporary speakers of Copala Triqui
  • making the work trilingual (Triqui - Spanish -English), in recognition of the fact that Copala Triquis now live in two nations
  • adding the ability to search the dictionary,
  • adding audio to the dictionary
  • adding more examples, most taken from a large corpus of texts