Upper Necaxa Totonac is a native American language of central 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...

 spoken by 3,400 people in and around four villages—Chicontla, Patla, Cacahuatlán, and San Pedro Tlaloantongo—in the Necaxa River Valley in Northern Puebla

Puebla

Puebla officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Puebla is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 217 municipalities and its capital city is Puebla....

 State. Although speakers represent the majority of the adult population in Patla and Cacahuatlán, there are very few monolinguals and few if any children are currently learning the language as a mother tongue, and, as a consequence, the language must be considered severely endangered.

Phonology

In some respects, Upper Necaxa has a fairly typical Totonacan consonantal inventory, lacking a voice/voiceless opposition in stops and having the three lateral phonemes /l/, /ɬ/, and /tɬ/, although the lateral affricate /tɬ/ has largely been replaced by the voiceless lateral fricative /ɬ/, persisting in word-final position in only a few lexical items.

		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...	Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...		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...
			central Central consonant A central or medial consonant is a consonant sound that is produced when air flows across the center of the mouth over the tongue. The class contrasts with lateral consonants, in which air flows over the sides of the tongue rather than down its center....	lateral Lateral consonant A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth....
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
Plosive		p	t			k	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	tɬ	tʃ
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...	Plain		s	ɬ	ʃ	x
	Ejective Ejective consonant In phonetics, ejective consonants are voiceless consonants that are pronounced with simultaneous closure of the glottis. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated or tenuis consonants...		s’	ɬ’	ʃ’
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

The Upper Necaxan inventory is also notable in the family in that it lacks a uvular stop /q/ but contains a robust glottal stop phoneme, derived historically from *q. The loss of *q also resulted in the collapse of fricative + uvular sequences—*sq, *ʃq, and *ɬq—to ejective fricatives at the same point of articulation (i.e., s’, ʃ’, and ɬ’).

The vowel inventory is also somewhat different from most other members of the family, having full phonemic mid-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...		Central Central vowel A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a central vowel is that the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel...		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...
	creaky	plain	creaky	plain	creaky	plain
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...	ḭ ḭː	i iː			ṵ ṵː	u uː
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...	ḛ ḛː	e eː			o̰ o̰ː	o oː
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...			*a̰ *a̰ː	*a *aː

Although most examples of /e/ and /o/ are conditioned, at least diachronically, by adjacency to /ʔ/ (historically, *q) and, to a lesser extent, to /y/ and /x/, there are nevertheless enough instances of both without the conditioning environment that the vowels have to be considered phonemic.

Morphology

Like other Totonacan languages, Upper Necaxa is a highly polysynthetic agglutinating language, making extensive use of both prefixes and suffixes for inflection

Inflection

In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...

, quasi-inflection, and derivation

Derivation

Derivation may refer to:* Derivation , a function on an algebra which generalizes certain features of the derivative operator* Derivation * Derivation in differential algebra, a unary function satisfying the Leibniz product law...

.

Verbal inflection

Upper Necaxa verbs are inflected for three tenses (past, present, future), four aspects (imperfective, perfective, perfect, progressive), and four moods (indicative, optative, potential, irrealis). The tenses ares marked exclusively by prefixes in the past and future and by a zero in the present, while three of the fours aspects (imperfective, perfective, and perfect) are marked by suffixes. the fourth aspect, the progressive, is realized through the use of inflectional compounds

Compound (linguistics)

In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word formation that creates compound lexemes...

 formed on the stative verb maːɬ ‘be lying’.

Syntax

Upper Necaxa is a basically verb-initial, head-marking language with constituent order governed largely by information structure. Grammatical relations are marked exclusively by verbal agreement with subject and one or two objects, the language lacking any case or prepositions.

External links

• Upper Necaxa Totonac Project

Notes
References