Background

Language Family: Mayan / Kanjobalan-Chujean / Chujean

Note: The Crúbadán code for the entire Chuj language is cac; however, I will be principally focusing on the Ixtatán dialect of Chuj (cnm) because it has a larger corpus in Crúbadán.

Phonology

Consonants

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stops	p ɓ	t tʼ			k kʼ		ʔ
Affricates		ts tsʼ	tʃ tʃʼ
Fricatives		s	ʃ			χ
Nasals	m	n			ŋ
Flaps		ɾ
Approximants	w	l		j
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are plain and those on the right are implosive (labial stop) or ejective.

Vowels

Williams, Kenneth and Williams, Barbara (1965) lists /aː/ as phonemic (p. 225), but this does not appear in any of the other sources.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Alphabet

Chuj has multiple orthographies, which represent some phonemes in different ways; however, these orthographies do not have any overlap that would create ambiguity, meaning that the language is not compromised. I have documented the the variations within the chart below.

Grapheme	Phoneme
a	/a/
b’	/ɓ/
c	/k/
c’	/kʼ/
d’	/tʼ/
e	/e/
i	/i/
j	/χ/
k	/k/
k’	/kʼ/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
n̈	/ŋ/
o	/o/
p	/p/
r	/ɾ/
s	/s/
t	/t/
t’	/tʼ/
u	/u/
v	/w/
w	/w/
x	/ʃ/
y	/j/
’	/ʔ/
Digraph
ch	/tʃ/
ch’	/tʃʼ/
nh	/ŋ/
qu	/k/
q’u	/kʼ/
tz	/ts/
tz’	/tsʼ/

Lenition Rules

Some instances of historic /q/ have spirantized to become /χ/ in modern Chuj (Raymundo Gonzales 2014, 21–22).

References

Raymundo Gonzales, Sonia Salome. 2014. “Comportamiento Fonológico Y Morfológico Del Idioma Chuj Con Relación Al Idioma Q’anjob’al.” PhD thesis, Rafael Landívar University.

Williams, Kenneth, and Williams, Barbara. 1965. “Chuj.” In Languages of Guatemala, edited by Marvin K. Mayers, 219–34. Mouton & Co.

Ixtatán Chuj