Phonology
Zenzontepec Chatino has 5 vowels: /a, e, i, o, u/. Vowels may be oral or nasal, and there is a contrast between short and long vowels. Stops and affricates are voiced when preceded by a nasal consonant, but are otherwise voiceless. Zenzontepec Chatino has predictable stem-final stress. In native vocabulary, the only permissible coda is the glottal stop. Phonological evidence, including evidence from a play language, suggests that the glottal stop of word-medial ʔC clusters belongs to the onset of the following syllable rather than the coda of the preceding syllable, and therefore true codas are only found word-finally.Tone
Zenzontepec Chatino's tone bearing unit is the mora, and each mora may be assigned a mid tone /M/, a high tone /H/, or be unspecified for tone /Ø/. In practical orthographies, tones are often indicated by accents over vowels: acute accents for /H/ tones, macrons or grave accents for /M/ tones, and no accent if tone is unspecified. On words with two or more moras (polysyllabic words or monosyllabic words with long vowels) different combinations of tones can be found (/ØØ/, /ØM/, /MH/, /HØ/, and /HM/), some of which are morphologically specialized (/ØH/ and /MM/ which only appear on words inflected for second person singular), while others do not occur (/MØ/ and /HH/).Tone processes
The high tone /H/ (but not the mid tone /M/) will spread through following toneless moras until coming into contact another /H/ or /M/ tone or the end of an intonational phrase. The /M/ or /H/ tones that the spreading /H/ tone runs in to will be downstepped phonetically, but will remain /M/ or /H/ phonologically. /M/ tones on monomoraic enclitics will become /H/ tones if its host's tone is /M/ or /ØM/.Play language
Speakers of Zenzontepec Chatino formerly used a play language called ''nchakwiɁ tsūɁ ntīlú'' 'speaking backwards' in which a word's first syllable was transposed to the end of the word, and its tones were replaced with /HØ/.References
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