Tol (''Tolpan''), also known as Eastern Jicaque, Tolupan, and Torupan, is spoken by approximately 500

Tolupan people The Tolupan or Jicaque people are an indigenous ethnic group of Honduras, primarily inhabiting the northwest coast of Honduras

in La Montaña de la Flor reservation in

Francisco Morazán Department Francisco Morazán (), FMO is one of the departments of Honduras. It is located in the central part of the nation. The departmental capital is Tegucigalpa, which is also Honduras's national capital. Until 1943 it was known as Tegucigalpa depart ...

Honduras Honduras, officially the Republic of Honduras, is a country in Central America. The republic of Honduras is bordered to the west by Guatemala, to the southwest by El Salvador, to the southeast by Nicaragua, to the south by the Pacific Oce ...

Name

Tol speakers refer to themselves as the Tolpán, but are called Jicaques or Turrupanes by ladinos.

Former extent

Tol was also spoken in much of Yoro Department, but only a few speakers were reported in the Yoro Valley in 1974. Tol used to be spoken from the

Río Ulúa Rio or Río is the Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Maltese word for "river". When spoken on its own, the word often means Rio de Janeiro, a major city in Brazil. Rio or Río may also refer to: Geography Brazil * Rio de Janeiro * Rio do Sul, a ...

in the west, to modern-day Trujillo in the east, and to the Río Sulaco in the inland south. This area included the areas around modern-day El Progreso,

La Ceiba La Ceiba () is a municipality, the capital of the Honduran department of Atlántida and a port city on the northern coast of Honduras in Central America. It is located on the southern edge of the Caribbean, forming part of the south eastern bo ...

, and possibly also

San Pedro Sula San Pedro Sula () is the capital of Cortés Department, Honduras. It is located in the northwest corner of the country in the Sula Valley, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) south of Puerto Cortés on the Caribbean Sea. With a population of 671,46 ...

. Most Tolupan had fled the Spanish from coastal regions by the early 1800s. The Tol speakers at La Montaña de la Flor fled the Yoro Valley in 1865 to avoid being conscripted into forced labor by the local governor (Campbell & Oltrogge 1980:206, Hagen 1943, Chapman 1978).

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Grammar

The following overview is based on Haurholm-Larsen (2014).Haurholm-Larsen, Steffen. 2014
Exploring grammatical categories of Tol.
Talk given at Workshop "State of the art of Mesoamerican linguistics". Leipzig.

Constituent order

The basic constituent order of Tol is SOV and the language displays a consistently head final order of constituents, i.e. verbs follow the subject and the object, there are

postposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...

s instead of prepositions, and subordinating conjunctions appear at the end of subordinate clauses.

Inflection

Verbs and nouns are inflected for person, number and, in the case of verbs, tense, using a number of different morpho-syntactic means which often conflate various meanings (polyexponentiality). These means include, prefixing, suffixing and infixing, ablaut and stress shift and the use of independent pronouns. Tense is also expressed by the use of particles. Number is only marked in noun phrases with animate referents. Some examples are given below. :''m-wayúm'' 'my husband'
''w-y-ayúm'' 'your husband'
''woyúm'' 'her husband'
''kʰis wayúm'' 'our husband'
''his wayúm'' 'your husband'
''his wayúm'' 'their husband' :''napʰ üsü müˀüs'' 'I am drinking water'
''hipʰ üsü müs'' 'you are drinking water'
''hupʰ üsü mü'' 'he is drinking water'
''kupʰ üsü miskʰékʰ'' 'we are drinking water'
''nun üsü müskʰé'' 'you are drinking water'
''yupʰ üsü miˀün'' 'they are drinking water' Most nouns take one of three suffixes: ''-(sV)s'', ''-(V)N'', ''-(V)kʰ''. Examples: :''wo-sís'' 'house' (root: ''wa'')
''sitʰ-ím'' 'avocado' (root: ''sitʰ'')
''kʰon-íkʰ'' 'bed' (root: ''kʰan'') Nouns that never take suffixes refer to body parts and kinship terms.

References

* Campbell, Lyle, and David Oltrogge (1980). "Proto-Tol (Jicaque)." ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', 46:205-223 * Dennis, Ronald K. (1976). "La lengua tol (jicaque): los sustantivos." ''Yaxkin'' 1(3): 2-7. * Fleming, Ilah. (1977). "Tol (Jicaque) phonology." ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 43(2): 121-127. * Holt, Dennis. (1999). ''Tol (Jicaque)''. Languages of the World/Materials 170. Munich: LincomEuropa. {{Languages of Honduras Jicaquean languages Languages of Honduras Indigenous languages of the Americas