Native speakers 2,100 (2000) Glottolog coat1241 | ISO 639-3 miz | |
Language family Oto-MangueanMixtecanMixtecCoatzospan–CuyamecalcoCoatzospan Mixtec | ||
Coatzospan Mixtec (Coatzóspam Mixtec) is a Mixtec language of Oaxaca spoken in the town of San Juan Coatzospan.
Phonology
Consonants in parentheses are marginal:
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 ...