Sierra Popoluca, also known as Soteapanec, Soteapan Zoque, or Highland Popoluca, is a developing
Mixe-Zoquean language of the
Zoquean branch.
It has 35,050 speakers (INALI, 2009)
[INALI (2009)]
''Catálogo de las Lenguas Indígenas Nacionales: Variantes Lingüísticas de México con sus autodenominaciones y referencias geoestadísticas.''
México. who live in the southern part of
Veracruz
Veracruz (), formally Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave (), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave), is one of the 31 states which, along with Me ...
,
Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...
. Sierra Popoluca has two sister languages,
Texistepec
Texistepec is a municipality located in the south-east zone in the State of Veracruz, about 285 km from state capital Xalapa. It has a surface of 615.26 km2. It is located at . Texistepec in 1580 concerned to Coatzacoalcos's province. In 1831 ...
and
Ayapanec, both of which are severely endangered.
The word ''
popoluca
Popoluca is a Nahuatl term for various indigenous peoples of southeastern Veracruz and Oaxaca. Many of them (about 30,000 '' means "gibberish” in
Nahuatl
Nahuatl (; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahua peoples, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller ...
, and the name Sierra Popoluca comes from the language being labelled as such at the time of conquest. To avoid the derogatory connotations of ''popoluca'', some researchers have adopted the name Soteapanec for the language instead (named after the largest municipality it is spoken in). However, modern speakers do not seem to be concerned with the history of the word and simply see it as the name of their language.
Natively, speakers refer to the language as ''Nuntajɨyi'', which means "true word," and themselves as ''Nundajɨypappɨc''.
Distribution
Sierra Popoluca is spoken in the following municipalities:
*
Soteapan
Soteapan is a municipality and city located in the south-central zone of the Mexican State of Veracruz, about 260 km from state capital Xalapa. As of 2000, the municipality counted 27,487 inhabitants within 528.07 km², including about 10,000 in ...
*
Tatahuicapan
Tatahuicapan de Juárez or Tatahuicapan is a municipality located in the south-east of the state of Veracruz in Mexico. It was created in 1997 with an area of 208.06 km2.
Geography
The municipality of Tatahuicapan is delimited to the north, south ...
*
Hueyapan de Ocampo
Hueyapan de Ocampo is a Mexican municipality Veracruz. It is located in south of the state, about 245 km from state capital Xalapa. The municipality has an area of 824.18 km.
The municipality of Hueyapan de Ocampo is delimited to the n ...
Other communities where it is spoken include Catemaco, Piedra Labrada, and Santa Rosa Cintepec.
Nahuatl
Nahuatl (; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahua peoples, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller ...
and
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...
are also spoken in nearby areas, and have influenced Sierra Popoluca through language contact.
Writing system
Two Sierra Popoluca spellings have been developed, one by the
SIL international
SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is an evangelical Christian non-profit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to ex ...
and another by the Academia Veracruzana de las Lenguas Indígenas.
With the AVELI spelling, the long vowels are represented by doubling the letter, the glottal stop is represented by the apostrophe.
With the spelling of SIL, long vowels are represented with a macron below the letter and the glottal stop is indicated with the acute accent on the vowel which precedes it, except when it is between two vowels or at the end of word.
Phonology
Vowels
Sierra Popoluca has twelve vowel phonemes: six distinct
short vowels
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, f ...
(front vowels /i/ and /ɛ/, central vowels /ɘ/ and /a/, and back vowels /u/ and /ɔ/) with a corresponding
long vowel
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, f ...
for each.
Consonants
Sierra Popoluca's consonant inventory consists of thirteen consonants.
Some words in Sierra Popoluca contain "an unspecified underlying segment, identified as the segment /H/."
Depending on the environment it appears in, /H/ can alternate in three different ways, as described by the rules below:
In addition to its main consonant inventory, Sierra Popoluca also has a restricted phoneme inventory consisting of eleven consonants. These consonants are considered "restricted" because the only words they appear in are either
ideophones, Spanish borrowings, or stylistic alterations.
Syllable structure
Sierra Popoluca's syllabic template is (C)CV(ː)(ʔ)(C)(C). Words containing examples of each syllable structure are given in the table below:
Sierra Popoluca has
phonotactic
Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek "voice, sound" and "having to do with arranging") is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable struc ...
restrictions on both onset and coda clusters. For onsets, only the clusters /tr/, /kr/, and /kw/ are allowed. For codas, all two consonant clusters must begin with one of /p, k, ʔ/, and three consonant clusters are restricted to only /ʔps/ and /ʔks/.
Stress
There are three degrees of stress in Sierra Popoluca: primary stress (which may fall on the penultimate or ultimate syllable), secondary stress (which is assigned to the leftmost syllable that is not a clitic), and tertiary stress (which falls on the heaviest syllable preceding primary stress). Words containing examples of each stress paradigm are given in the table below:
Morphology
Sierra Popoluca is an
agglutinating
An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to remain ...
,
polysynthetic
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to ...
language whose morpheme inventory is primarily inflectional and consists of roughly an equal number of clitics and suffixes, with no prefixes. The morphological processes reduplication and compounding are also observed in Sierra Popoluca.
Sierra Popoluca has three major word classes: nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Suffixes
Sierra Popoluca has 28 suffixes, all of which can be categorized as either
derivational,
inflectional
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...
, or
valency adjusting. Nouns only take derivational suffixes whereas verbs take suffixes from all three categories.
Examples of each suffix type are given in the table below:
Proclitics
There are 17 proclitics in Sierra Popoluca. Out of these, ten are used for person marking, three are used for valency adjusting, two are derivational, and the final two have other, unique functions. Verbs in Sierra Popoluca can take all proclitic types while nouns can take all but valency adjusting proclitics.
Examples of various proclitics are given in the table below:
Enclitics
Sierra Popoluca has nine enclitics, six of which are adverbial, two of which are inflectional, and one of which is a relativizer. Nouns can take all three types of enclitic whereas verbs can only take adverbial enclitics. Examples of each enclitic type are given in the table below:
Reduplication
Reduplication of the root (full reduplication) is observed with both nouns and verbs in Sierra Popoluca, and can be inflectional or derivational.
Though generally used to convey intensity or frequency, reduplication can also express "a sense of wandering around repeating an action"
when paired with the ambulative suffix ''-ʔoʔy''.
Various examples of reduplication are given in the table below:
Compounding
Compounding is observed in all word classes in Sierra Popoluca and is highly productive.
Various examples of compound words are given in the table below:
Syntax
Sierra Popoluca is an
ergative-absolutive,
head-marking
A language is head-marking if the grammatical marks showing agreement between different words of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads (or nuclei) of phrases, rather than on the modifiers or dependents. Many languages employ both head-marking ...
language. At minimum, the basic clause can consist of just a predicate, as shown below:
At maximum, it can include an inflected complex predicate and up to three modified arguments:
Basic word order
Word order in Sierra Popoluca is pragmatically determined for the most part. In transitive sentences, all six possible word orders are attested, as shown below:
VSO
VOS
SVO
SOV
OVS
OSV
In intransitive sentences, both possible word orders are attested:
SV VSHowever, not all word orders are used with equal frequency; an analysis of over 4,000 clauses from various texts found the following distribution of word orders in transitive and intransitive sentences:
Distribution of Word Orders by Transitivity
Relative word order
In terms of relative word order, Sierra Popoluca exhibits some structural features common to VO (verb initial) languages and some common to OV (verb final) languages. A few examples of these structures are given below:
* Possessor precedes possessum (common to OV languages)
* Auxiliary verb precedes main verb (common to VO languages)
* Complementizer precedes complement clause (common to VO languages)
Order of nominal modifiers
Nouns in Sierra Popoluca can be modified by determiners, adjectives, quantifiers, possessors, and relative clauses.
Whether a modifier precedes or follows the noun it is modifying depends on the modifier, as illustrated below:
* Demonstratives precede the nouns they modify
* Adjectives precede the nouns they modify
* Relative clauses may either precede or follow the nouns they modify
Recordings
Sierra Popoluca Collection of Lynda Boudreaultfrom the
Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America
The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) is a digital repository housed in LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections at the University of Texas at Austin. AILLA is a digital language archive dedicated to the digi ...
. Contains 148 archival files, including audio recordings and transcripts from a wide range of genres.
Further reading
*Kaufman, Terrence. 2016a.
Soteapan Gulf Sokean Ethnobotanical Terminology'
*Kaufman, Terrence. 2016b.
Soteapan Gulf Sokean Ethnozoological Terminology'
References
{{Indigenous people of Oaxaca
Indigenous languages of Mexico
Mesoamerican languages
Mixe–Zoque languages
Languages of Mexico