Wixárika Dictionary

Wixárika is the language of the Huichol in the Sierra Madre Occidental in western Mexico. Around fifty thousand people speak it, mainly in Jalisco and Nayarit. It belongs to the large Uto-Aztecan language family and is closely related to Cora. In it the mara’akate sing the stories of the ancestors at night by the fire.

This dictionary is a small selection of cultural words: the sacred and the festivals, the ancestors, the sacred places, nature, art and community – each with a translation into five languages and with its source. Spellings are not uniform in Wixárika, so several variants are often given with a word.

How certain is a word?

Each word lists the sources in which it appears. Well attested means the word appears in this form, or in one of the listed spelling variants, in the dictionaries and the scholarly literature. For words marked spelling or meaning uncertain, the spelling varies widely, or the meaning is broader than a short translation can say.

Much of the knowledge of the Wixárika is sacred and is not shared with outsiders. This dictionary only names what appears in published works and has not been checked by native speakers – I am grateful for any hints and corrections.

More dictionaries

There are larger dictionaries of Wixárika, but their content is not under a free licence. So I do not copy them here but point to them: if you want to go deeper into the language, you will find many more words, sentences and learning aids there – made by people who work with the communities.

Interactive Wixárika dictionary (Ruta del Venado) INALI: Prontuario Huichol–Español (PDF) SIL school books in Huichol (Colegio de México) The Wixárika language in the Endangered Languages database