Editing Olmecs (section)

==Ethnicity and language==
[[File:Tumba Olmeca.jpg|thumb|left|Olmec tomb at La Venta Park, [[Villahermosa]], [[Tabasco]]]]
While the actual ethno-linguistic affiliation of the Olmec remains unknown, various hypotheses have been put forward. For example, in 1968 [[Michael D. Coe]] speculated that the Olmec were Maya predecessors.<ref>Coe (1968) p. 121.</ref>

In 1976, linguists [[Lyle Campbell]] and [[Terrence Kaufman]] published a paper in which they argued a core number of loanwords had apparently spread from a [[Mixe–Zoque languages|Mixe–Zoquean language]] into many other [[Mesoamerican languages]].<ref>Campbell & Kaufman (1976), pp. 80–89. For example, the words for "incense", "cacao", "corn", many names of various fruits, "nagual/shaman", "tobacco", "adobe", "ladder", "rubber", "corn granary", "squash/gourd", and "paper" in many Mesoamerican languages seem to have been borrowed from an ancient Mixe–Zoquean language.</ref> Campbell and Kaufman proposed that the presence of these core loanwords indicated that the Olmec – generally regarded as the first "highly civilized" Mesoamerican society – spoke a language ancestral to Mixe–Zoquean. The spread of this vocabulary particular to their culture accompanied the diffusion of other Olmec cultural and artistic traits that appears in the archaeological record of other Mesoamerican societies.

Mixe–Zoque specialist [[Søren Wichmann]] first critiqued this theory on the basis that most of the Mixe–Zoquean loans seemed to originate only from the Zoquean branch of the family. This implied the loanword transmission occurred in the period ''after'' the two branches of the language family split, placing the time of the borrowings outside of the Olmec period.<ref>Wichmann (1995).</ref> However, new evidence has pushed back the proposed date for the split of Mixean and Zoquean languages to a period within the Olmec era.<ref name="Wichmann, Beliaev 2008">Wichmann, Beliaev & Davletshin, (in press Sep 2008).</ref> Based on this dating, the architectural and archaeological patterns and the particulars of the vocabulary loaned to other Mesoamerican languages from Mixe–Zoquean, Wichmann now suggests that the Olmecs of San Lorenzo spoke proto-Mixe and the Olmecs of La Venta spoke proto-Zoque.<ref name="Wichmann, Beliaev 2008"/>

At least the fact that the Mixe–Zoquean languages are still spoken in an area corresponding roughly to the [[Olmec heartland]], and are historically known to have been spoken there, leads most scholars to assume that the Olmec spoke one or more Mixe–Zoquean languages.<ref>See Pool, p.&nbsp;6, or Diehl, p.&nbsp;85.</ref>