Zenzontepec Chatino
language
Zenzontepec Chatino, also known as Northern Chatino, or "Chatino Occidental Alto" is an indigenous Mesoamerican language, one of the Chatino family of the Oto-Manguean languages. It is not intelligible with other Chatino languages. It is spoken by one of the most isolated groups in Oaxaca, the Chatino people in the municipalities of Santa Cruz Zenzontepec and San Jacinto Tlacotepec, and in the former municipality of Santa María Tlapanalquiahuitl.
Phonology
Zenzontepec Chatino has 5 vowels: /a, e, i, o, u/. Vowels may be oral or nasal, and there is a contrast between short and long vowels.
Stops and affricates are voiced when preceded by a nasal consonant, but are otherwise voiceless.
Zenzontepec Chatino has predictable stem-final stress.
In native vocabulary, the only permissible coda is the glottal stop. Phonological evidence, including evidence from a play language, suggests that the glottal stop of word-medial ʔC clusters belongs to the onset of the following syllable rather than the coda of the preceding syllable, and therefore true codas are only found word-finally.
Tone
Zenzontepec Chatino's tone bearing unit is the mora, and each mora may be assigned a mid tone /M/, a high tone /H/, or be unspecified for tone /Ø/.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zenzontepec Chatino” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.