Huehuetla Tepehua is a moribund

Tepehua language Tepehua is a language cluster of Mexico, spoken across a number of central Mexican states by the Tepehua people. Tepehua is a Indigenous languages of Mesoamerica, Mesoamerican language and shows many of the traits which define the Mesoamerican L ...

spoken in Huehuetla, northeastern

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. There are fewer than 1,500 speakers left according to Susan Smythe Kung (2007).

Syntax

Word order tends to be VSO, although it can be SVO at times (Kung 2007).

Phonology

Consonants

Huehuelta Tepehua has 26 consonant phonemes.The following table lists these phonemes and uses Kung's practical orthography in angled brackets. The voiced stops , , and , as well as the flap and the trill , appear only in loanwords and ideophones. In younger speakers, the uvular /q/ has merged with the glottal stop /ʔ/. Based on fieldwork from previous linguists and interviews with modern speakers, Kung theorizes that merged into between 1945 and 1984. When Kung began her fieldwork in 1999, was only consistently found in speakers over 65.

Vowels

Hueheutla Tepehua has ten phonemic vowels. Earlier stages of the language only had six, with , , , and in complimentary distribution.

Morphology

Huehuetla Tepehua has a large variety of affixes. ;Valency-changing affixes *Reflexive *Reciprocal *Dative *Causative *Instrumental *Comitative *Applicative ;Aspectual derivational affixes *Inchoative *Imminent *Roundtrip *Ambulative *Begin *Desiderative *Repetitive *Again *All *Distal *Proximal ;Derivative affixes *Agent nominalizer *Non-agentive nominalizers and *Deverbalizer *Instrumental and *Locative *Applicative *Comitative

References

Sources

*{{cite thesis , last=Kung , first=Susan Smythe , year=2007 , url=http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/3137 , title=A Descriptive Grammar of Huehuetla Tepehua , degree=Ph.D. , publisher=The University of Texas at Austin Indigenous languages of Mexico Mesoamerican languages Totonacan languages