Chontal

Part of speech: noun, adjective

Definitions

1. A member of any of several indigenous peoples of southern Mexico, especially in Oaxaca and Tabasco ; the Mesoamerican language spoken by those communities
2. An Indigenous person from the Mexican states of Oaxaca or Tabasco, belonging to a group with its own history and traditions ; the Mayan-family tongue traditionally spoken by these people
3. One of the native groups living in the southern lowlands of Mexico ; the indigenous language associated with those communities and related to other Mayan languages

Etymology: The name comes from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, in which "chontalli" meant roughly "foreigner" or "stranger." Nahuatl speakers applied it to neighboring peoples who spoke other languages, and Spanish colonizers adopted it as a label for them. It is an outsider's name, not a people's own term for themselves. The surprise is that the label covers two unrelated groups. The Chontal Maya of Tabasco, in southeastern Mexico, speak a Mayan language. Farther west, in Oaxaca, another Chontal people speak a language of the Tequistlatecan family, which has no known relationship to Mayan. Both were named by neighbors who did not speak their languages, so the same foreign label landed on two peoples with nothing in common except that they were not Nahuatl speakers.