# Tuyuca language

Tuyuca (also Dochkafuara, Tejuca, Tuyuka, Dojkapuara, Doxká-Poárá, Doka-Poara, or Tuiuca) is an Eastern Tucanoan language (similar to Tucano). Tuyuca is spoken by the Tuyuca, an indigenous ethnic group of some 500-1000 people, who inhabit the watershed of the Papuri River, the Inambú River, and the Tiquié River, in Vaupés Department, Colombia, and Amazonas State, Brazil.

## Grammar

Tuyuca is a postpositional agglutinative subject–object–verb language with mandatory type II evidentiality. Five evidentiality paradigms are used: visual, nonvisual, apparent, second-hand, and assumed, but second-hand evidentiality exists only in the past tense, and apparent evidentiality does not occur in the first-person present tense.

## Phonology

Tuyuca's consonants are /p t k b d ɡ s r w j h/, and its vowels are /i ɨ u e a o/, with syllable nasalization and pitch accent occurring as well.

### Vowels

| | Front | Central | Back |
| High | i | ɨ | u |
| Low | e | a | o |

### Consonants

| | | Labial | Coronal | Palatal | Velar |
| Obstruent | voiceless | p | t | s | k |
| Obstruent | voiced | b ~ m | d ~ n | dʒ ~ ɲ ~ j | ɡ ~ ŋ |
| Sonorant | Sonorant | w ~ w̃ | ɺ ~ r ~ r̃ | dʒ ~ ɲ ~ j | h ~ h̃ |

#### Contrasts

The following words show some of the consonant contrasts.

##### Bilabial contrasts

    /pakó/ 'mom'
    /bapá/ 'plate'
    /wapá/ 'payment'

##### Alveolar contrasts

    /botéa/ 'a fish'
    /bodé/ 'dragonfly'
    /bosé/ 'party'
    /boré/ 'whitening'
Velar and palatal contrasts
    /bɨkó/ 'ant-eater'
    /bɨɡó/ 'aunt'
    /hoó/ 'plantain'
    /joó/ 'thread'

#### Variation

* Voiceless plosives /p, t, k/ have aspirated variants that tend to occur before high vowels but not near voiceless vowels. There are a few degrees of the amount of aspiration.
* Preglottalized variants of /b, d/ occur together at the onset.
** Preglottalized forms of [m, w, w̃, j, j̃, ɲ, dʒ] occur in the onset and are in free variation with their plain counterparts.
* Prenasal variants of /b, d, ɡ/ occur after nasal vowels and before oral vowels: /kĩĩbai/ [kʰĩĩmbaii̥].

#### Nasal assimilation

* Voiced consonants /b, d, ɡ, r, w, j/ have nasal variants at the same place of articulation before nasal vowels: [m, n, ŋ, ɳ, w̃, j̃].
** The /j/ can also surface as ɲ before high nasal vowels.
* The /h/ also has a nasalized variant that occurs before nasal vowels.

#### Nasal harmony

Segments in a word are either all nasal or all oral.
    /waa/ 'to go'
    /w̃ãã/ 'to illuminate' (the /w/ is nasal)
Note that voiceless segments are transparent.
    /ãkã/ 'choke on a bone'
    /w̃ãtĩ/ 'demon'
See further remarks regarding the oral/nasal nature of affixes in the Morphophonemics section.

### Suprasegmental features

Tuyuca's two suprasegmental features are tone and nasalization.

#### Tone

There is a high tone (H) and a low tone (L) in Tuyuca. The phonological word has only one high tone, which may occur in any syllable of the word. The low tone has two variants: a mid-tone, which occurs in words with at least three syllables in free variation, and the low tone, which occurs in internal syllables that have [i] that is contiguous to the high tone but not preceded by a low tone.
* The accent is the same as high tone.
* The tone is contrastive in (C)VV syllables.
    /díi/ 'blood'
    /dií/ 'mud'
* (C)VCV words, except for loanwords, have the tone on the second syllable.
    /eté/ 'parakeet'
    /b̃ésa/ 'table' (← Portuguese 'mesa')

#### Nasalization

Nasalization is phonemic and operates at the root level.
    /sĩã/ 'to kill'
    /sia/ 'to tie'

### Phonetic distribution and syllabic structure

A syllable is any unit that may take tone and has a vocalic nucleus, regardless of whether or not it has a consonant before it.

#### Restrictions

* /ɡ/ and /r/ do not occur word-initially
* /ɡu/ and /wu/ do not occur.
* No VV string starts with /u/.
* Multisyllabic VVV strings occur, but not all combinations of vowels are attested. /u/ is always last in such strings.
* (C)V may be optionally be pronounced with aspiration, with the same quality as the preceding vowel, when the syllable is both unstressed and before syllables with voiceless onsets.

### Morphophonemics

All affixes are in one of the two classes:
* Oral affixes that may undergo nasalization, like the plural morpheme -ri: /sopéri/ 'marks'
* Affixes that are intrinsically oral or nasal and are not changed.
When a nasal CV suffix occurs and C is a continuant or a vibrant /r/, regressive nasalization is undergone by the preceding vowel.