The purpose of this article is to analyze one aspect of language vitality of a Mexican indigenous language, as well as to make people aware of minority languages shift in this country.   Moreover, an increasing number of languages around the world are disappearing as a consequence of language shift, for instance the Otomí language, an indigenous language spoken in the south of Mexico, whose speakers are distributed in some of the States. However, this article is focused in a community in Queretaro, called Santiago Mexquititlán, located near the capital of the country.

The study was developed by means of a survey about the knowledge and use of the language at home in the community, taking into account factors like age and gender for the language vitality analysis.  The theoretical model used to explain language shift is the pressure ecology, which refers to the relationship between two or more languages in contact and the forces or pressures that exist to modify such situation. 

The concept of pressure is linked to power, ideologies, values, human actions and attitudes that lead to the social action of individuals or groups, therefore, a modification in these relations could be a factor to weaken the minority language.

Finally, the results indicate that younger generations are no longer using the minority language to communicate to each other, so there is a slow but continuous trend towards language shift to Spanish caused mainly by pressure ecology .