Ixil

Last updated: 2020-02-18

SLIGHTLY COMPROMISED: word-initial glottal stop not always marked; slightly ambiguous orthography

Background

Language Family: Mayan/ Quichean-Mamean / Greater Mamean / Ixilan

• Ixil is spoken in the Quiché department of Guatemala.
• The Chajul dialect (as opposed to the Nebaj dialect) is represented below (i.e. the Crúbadán corpus reflects it better).

Phonology

Consonants

• Chajul Ixil is rather unique in that it has alveo-postalveolar consonants, which are said not to be present in any other language (Adell 2019, 62). In terms of the terminology and IPA symbols, I have chosen to use those represented in both Adell (2019) (p. 38) and Adell (2016) (p. 3).
• /q/ is said to be undergoing sound change to /χ/, so the phonemic status of /χ/ is somewhat unclear (Adell 2019, 83). Ayres (1991) treats it as a distinct phoneme (p. 2); however, Adell (2019) does not, stating that, depending on the age group, speakers often treat it as if it’s in free variation with /q/ (p. 86).
  • With such sound change, /χ/, especially with younger generations, is said to be merging with /h/.
  • I have chosen to follow the more recent source, not treating /χ/ as a distinct phoneme (Adell 2019, 38).
• /d/ and /ɡ/ appear in loanwords (Ayres 1991, 1).

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Alveo-Postalveolar	Postalveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stops	p ɓ	t tʼ					k kʼ	q qʼ	ʔ
Affricates		ts tsʼ	tsʃ tsʃʼ	tʃ tʃʼ	ʈʂ ʈʂʼ
Fricatives		s	sʃ		ʂ				h
Nasals	m	n
Flaps		ɾ
Approximants	ʋ	l				j
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are plain and those on the right are ejectives. The labial stop on the right is an implosive.

Vowels

• Vowel length is contrastive in Ixil (Ayres 1991, 1). Long vowels are indicated by duplicate vowels.
  • When two consecutive like-vowels appear that don’t constitute a long vowel, a hyphen is inserted between them.
• In native words, adjacent vowels do not represent complex nuclei (ibid.).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Alphabet

• Word-initial glottal stop (the phonemic status of which is in question in this position) is not always written, which compromises the language to some extent (Ayres 1991, 5; Adell 2019, 89–96).
• Adell (2019) also indicates variation in the orthography for some consonants (p. 23), which is also problematic. However, I have chosen to use the orthography represented in Ayres (1991), which seems largely consistent with what is used in Crúbadán (p. 1).

Grapheme	Phoneme
a	/a/
b’	/ɓ/
e	/e/
h	/h/
i	/i/
j	/h/
k	/k/
k’	/kʼ/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
p	/p/
q	/q/
q’	/qʼ/
r	/ɾ/
s	/s/
t	/t/
t’	/tʼ/
u	/u/
v	/ʋ/
x	/ʂ/
y	/j/
’	/ʔ/
Multigraph
ch	/tʃ/
ch’	/tʃʼ/
tch	/tsʃ/
tch’	/tsʃʼ/
tx	/ʈʂ/
tx’	/ʈʂʼ/
tz	/ts/
tz’	/tsʼ/
xh	/sʃ/

Lenition Rules

• /h/ is often deleted (Ayres 1991, 20).
• /l/ sometimes deletes preceding consonants (Ayres 1991, 21).

Misc. Rules

• /n/ assimilates in place to the following consonant (Ayres 1991, 24–25).
• /ʋ/ has several phonetic realizations that frequently vary freely (Adell 2019, 50–51).
• /ɾ/ is said to be realized as [r] in some environments, but it’s not exactly clear when this occurs. Adell (2019) explains that [r] occurs word-initially (p. 53), but Ayres (1991) states that it occurs word-finally, following a vowel (p. 3). However, this specification is not very relevant to this project.
  • After a glottal stop, /ɾ/ varies freely with [r] (Ayres 1991, 3).

References

Adell, Eric. 2016. “Coronal Contrasts in Chajul Ixil and the Development of the Mamean Languages.” PhD thesis.

———. 2019. “The Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology of Chajul Ixil (Mayan).” PhD thesis, The University of Texas at Austin.

Ayres, Glenn. 1991. La Gramática Ixil. La Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala: Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica.