Coatzospan Mixtec

Coatzospan Mixtec
(San Juan Coatzóspam)
Native to	Mexico
Region	Oaxaca
Native speakers	unknown (2,100 cited 2000)
Language family	Oto-Manguean Mixtecan Mixtec Coatzospan–Cuyamecalco Coatzospan Mixtec
Language codes
ISO 639-3	miz
Glottolog	coat1241

Coatzospan Mixtec (Coatzóspam Mixtec) is a Mixtec language of Oaxaca spoken in the town of San Juan Coatzospan.

Phonology

Consonants in parentheses are marginal:

Consonants

m	n	ɲ
(p)		t		k	kʷ
(mb)		nd		(ŋɡ)	(ŋɡʷ)
		ts	tʲ ~ tʃ
		(ndz)	(ndʲ ~ ndʒ)
β	ð (ðʲ)	(s)	ʃ
		l (r)

In women's speech, /t/ is realized as [tʃ] before front vowels.

Vowel qualities are /a ɨ e i o u/. Vowels may be oral or nasal, creaky or modal, long or short: e.g. /kɨ̰̃ː/ "to go". /o/ is apparently never contrastively nasalized, though it may be phonetically nasalized due to assimilation with a nasal vowel in a following syllable, and morphologically nasalized for the second-person familiar (e.g. /kḭʃi/ 'to come', /kḭʃĩ/ 'you will come'). The preceding vowel nasalizes only if the intervening consonant is voiced, or in some words /ʃ/. Nonetheless, even voiceless fricatives and affricates are phonetically nasalized in such environments: [β̃, ð̃, ts̃, ʃ̃]; the nasalization is visible in the flaring of the nostrils.

The first vowel of a disyllable is creaky if the second consonant is voiceless (except for /ʃ/); only when C2 is voiced or /ʃ/ can there be a contrast between creaky and modal vowels in V1. The irregular behavior /ʃ/ is apparently due to it deriving from proto-Mixtec from both voiceless velar */x/ and voiced */j/ ("*y"). It is words in which /ʃ/ derives from *j that allow V1 to be nasalized or contrastively modally voiced.

Tones are ...

References

• Gerfen, Chip. 1999. Phonology and Phonetics in Coatzospan Mixtec (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 48). Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.
• Gerfen, Chip. 2001. Nasalized Fricatives in Coatzospan Mixtec. International Journal of American Linguistics 67.4: 449-66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1265756
• Pike, Eunice V. & Priscilla C. Small. 1974. Downstepping terrace tone in Coatzospan Mixtec. In Ruth M. Brend (ed.), Advances in tagmemics (North-Holland Linguistic Series 9), 105-34. Amsterdam: North-Holland.