11972 Ópata Opata was believed to be dead already in 1930, and Carl Sofus Lumholtz reported the Opata to have become "Mexicanized" and lost their language and customs already when traveling through Sonora in the 1890s, but in a recent (1993) survey by the Instituto Nacional Indigenista 15 people in the Mexican Federal District self-identified as speakers of Ópata – this may not mean however that the language is actually living, since linguistic nomenclature in Mexico is notoriously fuzzy. And no studies documenting the language spoken by those 15 persons have been published. If the 15 were in fact speakers of Ópata then the language is severely endangered and if not it is probably already extinct. Sometimes Eudeve and Opata are considered distinct languages and sometimes merely dialects of one single language. Opata Language Off 15? or extinct?