Last Updated: 2020-08-13
Background
Language Family: Totonacan / Tepehua / Huehuetla Tepehua
- Huehuetla Tepehua is a language spoken in Huehuetla, a municipality in Hildago, Mexico.
Phonology
Consonants
- For younger speakers, the uvular and glottal stops have merged (Kung 2007, 31). Because older speakers still contrast /q/ with /ʔ/, I have chosen to include both below.
- Although /r/ and /ɾ/ are said to occur only in Spanish loanwords and ideophones, they are understood to be part of Huehuetla Tepehua’s phonemic inventory (Kung 2002, 167). I have chosen to include both below.
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Place of Articulation
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Manner of Articulation
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Bilabial
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Alveolar
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Postalveolar
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Palatal
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Velar
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Uvular
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Glottal
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Stops
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p pʼ
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t tʼ
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k kʼ
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q
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ʔ
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Affricates
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ts tsʼ
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tʃ tʃʼ
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Fricatives
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s ɬ
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ʃ
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h
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Nasals
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m
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n
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Liquids
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l
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Trills
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r
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Flaps
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ɾ
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Approximants
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w
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j
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Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are plain and those on the right are glottalized. Both alveolar fricatives are plain, but the one on the right is lateral.
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Vowels
- Vowel length is phonemic (Kung 2007, 31, 64). Long vowels are indicated with duplicate graphemes.
- Like other modern Totonacan languages, Huehuetla Tepehua evolved from a three vowel system to contrast five vowels, the mid vowels of which gained phonemic status through Spanish influence and ideophones (Kung 2007, 50).
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Front
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Central
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Back
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High
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i
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u
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Mid
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e
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o
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Low
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a
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Alphabet
- García Agustín (2012) appears to include a glottalized /q/ in the orthography (p. 13). As Kung (2002) notes, however, the glottalized uvular stop has merged with its plain counterpart (p. 167).
- García Agustín (2012) represents /w/ with ⟨v⟩ and /ts/ with ⟨ts⟩ (p. 13), while Kung (2007) uses ⟨w⟩ and ⟨tz⟩, respectively (pp. 33-34). Because there is no overlap with the different transcriptions that would conflate the different phonemes, I have included the orthographic variations from both sources below.
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Grapheme
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Phoneme
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a
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/a/
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c
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/k/
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c’
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/kʼ/
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e
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/e/
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i
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/i/
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j
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/h/
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k
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/k/
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l
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/l/
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m
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/m/
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n
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/n/
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o
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/o/
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p
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/p/
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p’
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/pʼ/
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r
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/ɾ/
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s
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/s/
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t
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/t/
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t’
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/tʼ/
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u
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/u/
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v
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/w/
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w
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/w/
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x
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/ʃ/
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y
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/j/
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’
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/ʔ/
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Digraph
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ch
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/tʃ/
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ch’
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/tʃʼ/
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qu
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/q/
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q’u
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/q/
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rr
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/r/
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lh
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/ɬ/
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ts
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/ts/
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ts’
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/tsʼ/
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tz
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/ts/
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tz’
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/tsʼ/
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Syllable Structure
- Syllables in HT follow the order (C)CV(V)(C)(C) (Kung 2007, 81).
Lenition Rules
- /p/, /t/, and /k/ are optionally voiced between voiced phonemes (Kung 2007, 38).
- For younger speakers, /q/ debuccalizes to /ʔ/ (Kung 2007, 67).
- /k/ spirantizes to [h] when preceded by a vowel and followed by a velar or uvular stop (Kung 2007, 137).
- When two identical consonants become adjacent because of morpheme concatenation, the first consonant is deleted (Kung 2007, 139).
- Stem final-glottal stops are deleted when followed by a suffix or enclitic (Kung 2007, 140).
- Intervocalic /h/ is deleted when followed by an unstressed vowel (Kung 2007, 143).
- When /n/ is part of the prefix kin- or min-, it deletes before an approximant (Kung 2007, 163).
Misc. Rules
- When short vowels occur utterance-finally, they are devoiced or deleted (Kung 2007, 124–26).
- /l/ neutralizes to [ɬ] in the coda position (Kung 2007, 126).
- A glottal stop is inserted preceding syllable-initial vowels (Kung 2007, 129).
- Nasals assimilate to the place of a following consonant, and velars assimilate to the place of a following uvular (Kung 2007, 132).
- When the sequence /kh/ occurs after /a/, metathesis occurs and the sequence becomes /hk/ (Kung 2007, 135).
References
Kung, Susan Smythe. 2002. “Reconstructing Lost Phonemes in Huehuetla Tepehua Using ‘Affectionate Speech’.” In, 45:167–76. Austin: Texas Linguistic Forum.
———. 2007. “A Descriptive Grammar of Huehuetla Tepehua.” Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.