the totonac people speak totonac, which, together with tepehua, form an isolated language family; that is, they are not known to be related to any other languages or language families. there are several local varieties of totonac that are not mutually intelligible. the first grammatical and lexical descriptions of totonac accessible to europeans (now lost) were by fray andrés de olmos, who also wrote the first such descriptions of nahuatl and huastec (teenek).