Background

Language Family: Mixe-Zoque / Mixe / Western Mixe

Totontepec Mixe is spoken within 10 villages in the state of Oaxaca, located in Southern Mexico.

Phonology

/ʐ/ is said to be a phoneme by Crawford (1963), occurring intervocalically and following nasals (p. 44). However, I feel that occurrences of this is a due to a voicing process. Schoenhals, Alvin and Schoenhals, Louise C. (1965) state that the phoneme only occurs in loanwords (p. 300). For these reasons, I have chosen not to include it below.

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p	t d			k ɡ	ʔ
Affricates		ts
Fricatives	v	s	ʂ			h
Nasals	m	n
Approximants				j
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless, whereas those on the right are voiced.

Vowel length is contrastive in Totontepec Mixe (Crawford 1963, 32). Long vowels are shown by doubling the vowel characters (Schoenhals, Alvin and Schoenhals, Louise C. 1965, 301).
Stress is denoted by accented vowels; however, we do not account for stress, so accented vowels will be transcribed to their plain representations.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i	ɨ	u ʊ
Mid	e		o
Low	æ	a	ʌ
Note: The high back vowels are ordered tense and lax.

⟨b⟩, ⟨f⟩, ⟨k⟩, ⟨l⟩, ⟨ll⟩, ⟨r⟩, and ⟨z⟩ appear in loanwords (Schoenhals, Alvin and Schoenhals, Louise C. 1965, 299–300).

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
a̱	/ʌ/
c	/k/
d	/d/
e	/e/
e̱	/æ/
g	/ɡ/
i	/i/
j	/h/
k	/k/
m	/m/
n	/n/
ñ	/n/	since [ɲ] is not contrastive
o	/ʊ/
o̱	/o/	described by Schoenhals, Alvin and Schoenhals, Louise C. (1965) as more open than ⟨o⟩ (p. 300)
p	/p/
s	/s/
t	/t/
’	/ʔ/
u	/u/
u̱	/ɨ/
v	/v/
x	/ʂ/
y	/j/
Digraph
ch	/ʂ/
qu	/k/
ts	/ts/

/v/ approximates to [w] in some contexts (Crawford 1963, 37).
/p/ and /ts/ voice syllable-initially when preceded by nasals, or when in syllable-initial clusters (Crawford 1963, 38, 42).
When intervocalic, following a long vowel, or as part of a syllable-initial cluster, /ʔ/ reduces to a laryngealization of the preceding vowel (Crawford 1963, 45).

Words in Totontepec Mixe must be consonant-initial; words written with initial vowels are preceding with an unwritten yet predictable glottal stop (Schoenhals, Alvin and Schoenhals, Louise C. 1965, 302).
/v/ devoices in some coda clusters, and syllable-finally after a non-low vowel (Crawford 1963, 38).
Postconsonantal /j/ is usually realized as palatalization of the prior consonant (Crawford 1963, 39).
- The most dramatic case of this is that the sequence /ts j/ is realized as [tʃ] [Crawford (1963), p. 41].
Voiceless stops aspirate when word-final or in the coda of a stressed syllable (Crawford 1963, 42).
Voiceless stops at the beginning of a stop-final coda cluster aspirate (Crawford 1963, 43).
/n/ assimilates to the place of following velar or palatal consonants (Crawford 1963, 44).
Nasals devoice when in the same cluster as /h/, or when in clusters of three or more consonants (Crawford 1963, 44–45).
Central vowels tend to be fronted near /j/ or /ts/ (Crawford 1963, 47).
In unstressed syllables, the contrast collapses between each of the following pairs of vowels: /u ʊ/ /ɨ ʌ/ /e æ/ (Crawford 1963, 40).
In the coda of unstressed non-final syllables, voiceless stops are unreleased (Crawford 1963, 42).
At the beginning of a non-stop-final coda cluster, voiceless stops are unreleased (Crawford 1963, 43).

Crawford, John Chapman. 1963. Totontepec Mixe Phonotagmemics. Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Schoenhals, Alvin, and Schoenhals, Louise C. 1965. Vocabulario Mixe de Totontepec. Summer Institute of Linguistics.