Sierra Popoluca
Sierra Popoluca, also sometimes referred to as Soteapanec, Soteapan Zoque, or Highland Popoluca, is a Mixe–Zoquean language of the Zoquean branch. It is spoken by 28,000 (INALI 2008, based on INEGI 2000, 2005) indigenous Popoluca people in and around the town of Soteapan in the Sierra de Los Tuxtlas in southern Veracruz, Mexico. The speakers themselves call their language Nundajɨɨyi which means "true speech", and themselves Nundajɨypappɨc.
Distribution
Sierra Popoluca is spoken in the following municipalities in the southern foothills of the Sierra de los Tuxtlas (de Jong Boudreault 2009).
- Soteapan
- Tatahuicapan
- Hueyapan de Ocampo
- Benito Juárez
Towns where the language is spoken include San Pedro Soteapan, La Piedra Labrada, and Santa Rosa Cintepec. The Nahuatl language is also spoken in nearby Mecayapan, Tatahuicapan de Juárez, and Pajapan, and has influenced Sierra Popoluca as well.
Phonology
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Alveolo-Palatal | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosives | b, p | d, t | ɟ, c | ts | ɡ, k | ʔ |
| Fricatives | f | s | ʃ | tʃ | x | h |
| Nasals | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ||
| Rhotics | ɾ, r | |||||
| Lateral | l | |||||
| Approximants | w | j |
Vowels are /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, /ʉ/.[3]
Grammar
Sierra Popoluca is an ergative, agglutinating, polysynthetic, head-marking language.[4]
Recordings
- Sierra Popoluca Collection of Lynda Boudreault from the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America. Contains 148 archival files, including audio recordings and transcripts from a wide range of genres.
References and further reading
- ^ "Popoluca, Highland". Ethnologue. Retrieved 2018-07-28.
- ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Highland Popoluca". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
- ^ Diccionario Popoluca de Oluta: Popoluca - Español, Español - Popoluca; El sistema de sonidos del popoluca de Oluta. 1981.
- ^ De Jong Boudreault, Lynda (2009). A grammar of Sierra Popoluca (Dissertation). University of Texas at Austin.
- Gutiérrez-Morales, Salomé. 2008. Borrowing and Grammaticalization in Sierra Popoluca: The Influence of Nahuatl and Spanish. Ph.D. dissertation: University of California, Santa Barbara.
- Reading and Writing in Sierra Popoluca (SIL International) http://www-01.sil.org/americas/mexico/mixe/popoluca-sierra/L204c-Lectoescritura_Leer-poi.pdf
