Mazatec (Popolocan, Eastern Otomanguean) became world-renowned following an article by Pike & Pike (1947) and the famous chapter VIII in Pike (1948) on the Huautla variety, which inspired several other seminal studies by on this extremely relevant language as far as phonological typology is concerned. However the early monographs and sketches, which have had a major impact on modern linguistics (laying the premises for the syllabic constituency theory, the theory of tones and tone sandhi as well as their functions in inflectional systems), only take into account a minute proportion of this language's inner diversity. The ALMaz project is an attempt to both revisit second-hand data on Mazatec varieties all over the area where it is densely spoken (especially using Kirk 1966 lists of over 700 cognates as a data base), and to gather and process new data on Mazatec diatopic and diastratic variation, using computational geolinguistics.

This present work deliberately abandons the purpose of capturing the global resemblance between languages and the ambition of giving a rational foundation to probability of changes in linguistics, to focus instead on cladistic approach, which was applied to different dialects and data (gallo-romance, southern italo-romance) through an original coding of philological derivations. Results show good congruence with linguistic classification and provide new insight on how tackle various dialectological problems as borrowings.