Mexico does not have an official language but Spanish is the de facto national language spoken by the vast majority of the population, making Mexico the world's most populous Hispanophone country. The indigenous languages are from eleven language families, including four isolates and one that immigrated from the United States. The Mexican government recognizes 69 national languages, 63 of which are indigenous, including around 350 dialects of those languages. The large majority of the population is monolingual in Spanish. Some immigrant and indigenous populations are bilingual, while some indigenous people are monolingual in their languages. Mexican Sign Language is spoken by much of the deaf population, and there are one or two indigenous sign languages as well. The government of Mexico uses Spanish in most official purposes, but in terms of legislation, its status is not that of an official primary language. The Law of Linguistic Rights establishes Spanish as one of the country's national languages, along with 63 distinct indigenous languages (from seven large families, plus four counted as language isolates). The law, made widely known in 2003, requires the state to offer all of its services to its indigenous citizens in their mother tongues, but in practice this is not yet the case. Note that, as defined by mutual intelligibility, the number of spoken languages in Mexico is much greater than the 63 national languages, because National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI) counts distinct ethnic groups for the purposes of political classification. For instance, the Mixtec are a single ethnicity and therefore count as a single language for governmental/legal purposes, but there are a dozen distinct Mixtec dialect regions, each of which includes at least one variety that is not mutually intelligible with those of the other dialect regions (Josserand, 1983), and Ethnologue counts 52 varieties of Mixtec that require separate literature. Ethnologue currently counts 282 indigenous languages currently spoken in Mexico, plus a number of immigrant languages (Lewis et al. 2018). Due to the long history of marginalization of indigenous groups, most indigenous languages are endangered, with some languages expected to become extinct within years or decades, and others simply having populations that grow slower than the national average. According to the Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples (CDI) and National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI), while 10–14% of the population identifies as belonging to an indigenous group, around 6% speak an indigenous language. Language history