Isthmus–Mecayapan Nahuatl or Isthmus Nahuat(l) (native name: mela'tájtol) is a modern variety of Nahuatl spoken by about 20,000 people in Mecayapan

Mecayapan

Mecayapan is a municipality and city in Veracruz, Mexico. It is located in south-east zone of the State of Veracruz, about 428 km from state capital Xalapa. It has a surface of 523.96 km2...

 and Tatahuicapan

Tatahuicapan

Tatahuicapan de Juárez or Tatahuicapan is a municipality located in the south-east of the state of Veracruz in Mexico at . It was created in 1997 with an area of 208.06 km2.-Geographic Limits:...

, Veracruz

Veracruz

Veracruz, formally Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave , is one of the 31 states that, along with the Federal District, comprise the 32 federative entities of Mexico. It is divided in 212 municipalities and its capital city is...

, Mexico

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

.

Vowels

	Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...	back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...
Close Close vowel A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the...	i iː	o oː
Mid Mid vowel A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel...	e eː
Open Open vowel An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue...	a aː

Consonants

	Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals...	Dental	Post- alveolar Postalveolar consonant Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate...	Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...	Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....	Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...	m	n		ɲ
Plosive	p b	t d			k ɡ	ʔ
Affricate Affricate consonant Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :...		ts (dz*)	tʃ (dʒ)
Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...		s z	ʃ (ʒ*)			h
Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no...		l		j	w
Rhotic Rhotic consonant In phonetics, rhotic consonants, also called tremulants or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including "R, r" from the Roman alphabet and "Р, p" from the Cyrillic alphabet...		r

• Occur only as allophones.

Writing system

A a	B b	C c	Ch ch Ch (digraph) Ch is a digraph in the Roman alphabet and Uyghur. It is treated as a letter of its own in Chamorro, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Igbo, Quechua, Guarani, Welsh, Cornish, Breton and Belarusian Łacinka alphabets. In Vietnamese, it also used to be considered a letter for collation purposes but this is no...	D d	E e	F f	G g	H h	I i	J j	K k	L l
/a/	/b/	/k/	/tʃ/	/d/	/e/		/ɡ/		/i j/	/h/	/k/	/l/
M m	N n	O o	P p	Q q	R r	S s	T t	U u	V v	X x	Y y	Z z	' Saltillo Saltillo is the capital city of the northeastern Mexican state of Coahuila and the municipal seat of the municipality of the same name. The city is located about 400 km south of the U.S. state of Texas, and 90 km west of Monterrey, Nuevo León....
/m/	/n/	/o/	/p/	/k/	/r/	/s/	/t/	/w/		/ʃ/	/j/		/ʔ/

H is used at the beginnings of words before u, and has no value of its own. C is used to represent /k/ before the vowels a and o, while qu is used before i and e.

An underline

Underline

An underline, also called an underscore, is one or more horizontal lines immediately below a portion of writing. Single, and occasionally double , underlining was originally used in hand-written or typewritten documents to emphasise text...

 (a, e, i, o) is used to mark long vowels.

Stress on the second-last syllable of a word that does not end in l or r, and stress on the last syllable of a word that does end in l or r, is unmarked. All other stress patterns are marked with an acute accent

Acute accent

The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...

 on the stressed vowel (á, é, í, ó).

The letters f, k, v and z occur only in loanword

Loanword

A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...

s.

Grammar

This variety of Nahuatl has developed a distinction between inclusive and exclusive "we", which Classical Nahuatl and other modern forms of Nahuatl lack. The exclusive form is regularly derived from the first person singular ("I"), while the inclusive continues the suppletive

Suppletion

In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even "highly irregular". The term "suppletion" implies...

first person plural of Classical Nahuatl.

Classical		Isthmus-Mecayapan
1st person singular	niquīsa "I leave"	niquisa "I leave"	1st person singular
		niquisaj "We (not you) leave"	1st person plural exclusive
1st person plural	tiquīsaj "We leave"	tiquisaj "We (including you) leave"	1st person plural inclusive

External links

• Ethnologue
• SIL Mexico — includes sound recordings