This community dictionary of Lachixío Zapotec was compiled by Mark Sicoli in collaboration with speakers of the language from Santa Maria and San Vicente Lachixío. It utilizes the cultural resource management software Mukurtu as infrastructure for a living dictionary, enabling ongoing contributions from the speaker-community and enabling work toward a print-edition of the dictionary (for which all rights are reserved). The dictionary is open for community and research use but not for publication as a print dictionary for which rights are reserved to the ongoing project of Sicoli with community members of Lachixío.

The history of this work is long and ongoing. Sicoli began work with Lachixío community members in the summer of 1997, when a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh under the auspices of the Project for the Documentation of the Languages of MesoAmerica (PDLMA), directed by Terrence Kaufman, John Justeson, and Roberto Zavala Maldonado. Sicoli worked with Daniel Hernández Morgan of Santa Maria Lachixío starting in the summer of 1997 in Catemaco, Veracruz, and several subsequent summers working primarily with Daniel Hernández Morgan (DHM) and other speakers at the field station and through field work in Santa Maria Lachixío and additionally in San Vicente Lachixío and San Pablo el Rincón in the Sola de Vega district of Oaxaca. The lexical database was also contributed to by Mario Hernández García (MHG), Constantino Fabiano Hernández Garcia (CHG), and Adrian Hernández Reyes (AHR), and Felipa García Hernández (FGH). The lexical database was augmented through Sicoli’s dissertation fieldwork in 2004-2005 while a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, and through work with additional speakers focused on tasks of the Language of Perception project directed by Asifa Majid and Gunther Senft when Sicoli was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 2007-2010. Additional entries and examples were added during work on Sicoli’s 2021 book, Saying and Doing in Zapotec, which focused on the use of Lachixío Zapotec in everyday life collaborations. The dictionary entries have focused primarily on the speech of Santa Maria Lachixío, but also include variations from San Vicente Lachixío, two pueblos with a common and distinct history in their region. The Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica worked with Clemente Molina Nolasco (CMN) of San Vicente Lachixío in the summers of 1995 and 1996, with elicitation by Felicia Lee (1995), David Monje (1996), and Terrence Kaufman in both years. Sicoli worked with Teófilo Reyes (TR) of San Vicente in 1998 to verify these data, and as part of a dialect survey of Western Zapotec when a Master’s student at the University of Pittsburgh.

The current online community dictionary is being developed under a research fellowship with the Institute of Advanced Technology for the Humanities, part of Digital Humanities and the Library System of the University of Virginia. Research assistance has been provided by Emma Broadwater, and the development of the online infrastructure has been the outcome of collaborations with the IATH team Sarah Wells, Shayne Brandon, Doug Ross, Cindy Girard, and Lisa Blackmore. Uses and customizations are being done over 2026-7 with community members of Lachixío.