Mixtec phonology

This section describes the sound systems of Mixtec by each variety.

## Chalcotongo Mixtec

The table below shows the phonemic inventory of a selected Mixtec language, Chalcotongo Mixtec.

### Phoneme

1Most commonly actually a nasalized palatal approximant.

Vowels of the Mixtec languages

Not all varieties of Mixtec have the sibilant /s/. Some do not have the interdental fricative /ð/. Some do not have the velar fricative /x/. A few have the affricate /ts/. By some analyses, the sounds /m/ and /w/ ([β]) are allophones conditioned by nasalization (see below), as are /n/ and /nᵈ/, also /ɲ/ and /j/ ([ʒ]).

### Tone

It is commonly claimed that Mixtec distinguishes three different tones: high, middle, and low. Tones may be used lexically; for example:

**Kuu** [kùū] *to be*
**Kuu** [kūù] *to die*
In some varieties of Mixtec, tone is also used grammatically since the vowels or whole syllables with which they were associated historically have been lost.

In the practical writing systems the representation of tone has been somewhat varied. It does not have a high functional load generally, although in some languages tone is all that indicates different aspects and distinguishes affirmative from negative verbs.

### Nasalization

The nasalisation of vowels and consonants in Mixtec is an interesting phenomenon that has had various analyses. All of the analyses agree that nasalization is contrastive and that it is somewhat restricted. In most varieties, it is clear that nasalization is limited to the right edge of a morpheme (such as a noun or verb root), and spreads leftward until it is blocked by an obstruent (plosive, affricate or fricative in the list of Mixtec consonants). A somewhat more abstract analysis of the Mixtec facts claims that the spreading of nasalization is responsible for the surface "contrast" between two kinds of bilabials (/m/ and /β/, with and without the influence of nasalization, respectively), between two kinds of palatals (/ʒ/ and nasalized /j/—often less accurately (but more easily) transcribed as /ɲ/—with and without nasalization, respectively), and even two kinds of coronals (/n/ and /nᵈ/, with and without nasalization, respectively). Nasalized vowels which are contiguous to the nasalized variants are less strongly nasalized than in other contexts. This situation is known to have been characteristic of Mixtec for at least the last 500 years since the earliest colonial documentation of the language shows the same distribution of consonants.

### Glottalization

The glottalization of vowels (heard as a glottal stop after the vowel, and analyzed as such in early analyses) is a distinctive and interesting contrastive feature of Mixtec languages, as it is of other Otomanguean languages.

## Yoloxóchitl Mixtec

The sound system of Yoloxóchitl Mixtec (of Guerrero Mixtec) is described below.

### Sound inventory

Yoloxóchitl Mixtec Vowels
 Mid
 Open

Notes:

1. The syllable structure is (C)V(V); no consonant cluster or consonant coda allowed.
2. Oral and nasal vowels are contrastive.

### Tone

Yoloxóchitl Mixtec has nine tones: /˥ ˦ ˨ ˩ ˥˧ ˥˩ ˧˩ ˨˦ ˩˧/.

## References

1. ↑ Marlett (1992), McKendry (2001)
2. ↑ Macaulay and Salmons (1995)
3. ↑ DiCanio, C. T., Amith, J., & García, R. C. (2012). Phonetic Alignment in Yoloxóchitl Mixtec Tone. Presented at the *Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA)*.
4. ↑ DiCanio, Christian & Ryan Bennett. (To appear). Prosody in Mesoamerican Languages (pre-publication version). In C. Gussenhoven & A. Chen (Eds.), *The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody*.