Phonology
Consonants in parentheses are marginal. In women's speech, is realized as before front vowels. Vowel qualities are . Vowels may be oral or nasal, creaky or modal, long or short: e.g. "to go". is apparently never contrastively nasalized, though it may be phonetically nasalized due to assimilation with a nasal vowel in a following syllable, and morphologically nasalized for the second-person familiar (e.g. 'to come', 'you will come'). The preceding vowel nasalizes only if the intervening consonant is voiced, or in some words . Nonetheless, even voiceless fricatives and affricates are phonetically nasalized in such environments: ; the nasalization is visible in the flaring of the nostrils. The first vowel of a disyllable is creaky if the second consonant is voiceless (except for ); only when C2 is voiced or can there be a contrast between creaky and modal vowels in V1. The irregular behavior is apparently due to it deriving from proto-Mixtec from both voiceless velar and voiced ("*y"). It is words in which derives from *j that allow V1 to be nasalized or contrastively modally voiced. Tones are ...References
* Gerfen, Chip. 1999. Phonology and Phonetics in Coatzospan Mixtec (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 48). Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V. * * Pike, Eunice V. & Priscilla C. Small. 1974. Downstepping terrace tone in Coatzospan Mixtec. In Ruth M. Brend (ed.), Advances in tagmemics (North-Holland Linguistic Series 9), 105-34. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Mixtec language {{Oto-Manguean-lang-stub