This book provides a clear and comprehensive description of the Ocotepec/Tapalapa variant of Chiapas Zoque. Zoque is one of the two major branches of the Mixe-Zoquean language family, spoken in the southern part of Mexico. Until the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century the Mixe-Zoquean languages covered a large area from Veracruz on the Gulf coast to the border of Guatemala and the Pacific coast. Inscriptions in Zoque from the first half of the first millennium AD are theoldest known linguistic documents in Mesoamerica. The Zoquean area once included the entire heartland of the Olmecs, who
