The linguist and ethnomusicologist Else Ziehm became an expert in the San Pedro Jícora dialect of Nahuatl. As a result of anti-Semitism infecting the linguistics department at the University of Berlin in 1934, Ziehm switched to the Institut für Lautforschung and was awarded her doctorate for research on Romanian folk music in 1939. She began as an assistant curator at the Lautarchiv at the University, however the outbreak of the war only a few months later derailed her career. She returned to the field in the 1960s with the rediscovery of Konrad Theodor Preuss's Nahuatl manuscripts, editing them into a three volume edition that appeared between 1968 and 1976. Ziehm died in Berlin in 1993.

Ziehm's "Grammatik und Vokabular der Nahua-Sprache von San Pedro Jicora in Durango" was announced by the Berlin publishing firm of Gebrüder Mann as a forthcoming title for 1980-1981, however the work was never finished. The typescript (140p.) with manuscript emendations, does not include the vocabulary.