 The name "Zapotec" is an exonym; they were referred to by Nahuatl speakers as "tzapotēcah" (singular "tzapotēcatl"), which means "inhabitants of the place of sapote".The Zapotec referred to themselves by some variant of the term "Be'ena'a", which means "The Cloud People".The Zapotec languages belong to a language family called Oto-manguean, an ancient family of Mesoamerican languages.