The zapotec language testament of Sebastiana de Mendoza, c. 1675

Here we present the language and content of the last will and testament of a Zapotec woman named Sebastiana de Mendoza prepared no later than 1675. We provide historical context for understanding how and why the document was written and preserved, and summarize what the text tells us about the testator. We make observations about the lexicon, structure, and speech conventions of the original Zapotec and provide both morphological analysis and translation of the Zapotec language text. As the first published morphologi- cal analysis and English translation of a complete Zapotec language text from the Mexican Colonial period, our analysis presented here benefits not only our understanding of Zapotec as it was used in that time period, but is also relevant to the study of living Zapotecan languages, spoken today by some 400,000 people primarily in Oaxaca.