Francisco León Zoque

Last Updated: 2020-07-06

Background

Language Family: Mixe-Zoque / Zoque / Chiapas Zoque

• Francisco León Zoque is spoken in southern Mexico.

Phonology

Consonants

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p b	t̪ d̪				k ɡ	ʔ
Affricates			ts dz	tʃ
Fricatives	f		s	ʃ			h
Nasals	m		n		ɲ	ŋ
Trills			r
Approximants			l		j	w
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i	ɨ	u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Alphabet

• A superscript ⟨n⟩ is sometimes written word-initially, indicating nasalization of the word (Bartholomew and Engel 1987, 334–35). This occurs only in cases where words do no contain stops or affricates or where words that contain stops or affricates occur in combination with other consonants. These environments seem to prevent standard affixation of nasals where assimilation to stops and affricates generally occurs (see Misc. Rules). Given that this suprasegmental feature seems to pose no contrastiveness in terms of when it does and does not occur, I have opted to not include it in the transcription.
• Stress is denoted by accented vowels; however, we do not account for stress, so accented vowels will be transcribed to their plain counterparts.

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
b	/b/
c	/s/; /k/	/s/: preceding front vowels
d	/d̪/
e	/e/
f	/f/
g	/ɡ/
i	/i/
j	/h/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
ñ	/ɲ/
ṉ	/ŋ/
o	/o/
ø	/ɨ/
p	/p/
r	/r/
s	/s/
t	/t̪/
u	/u/
v	/w/
y	/j/
’	/ʔ/
Digraph
ch	/tʃ/
dz	/dz/
tz	/ts/
gu	/ɡ/	preceding front vowels
qu	/k/	preceding front vowels
sy	/ʃ/

Lenition Rules

• /p/, /t/, /ts/, and /k/ become voiced preceding nasals (not necessarily homorganic) (Bartholomew and Engel 1987, 334).

Misc. Rules

• Through affixation, nasals tend to assimilate in place to stops and affricates (Bartholomew and Engel 1987, 334–35).
• Affixation involving /j/ generally results in palatalization of stops and affricates (Bartholomew and Engel 1987, 335).
• For words that are vowel initial, a glottal stop always precedes them (Bartholomew and Engel 1987, 335–36).
• Glottal stops, present in suffixes, become /h/ when affixed to morphemes (Bartholomew and Engel 1987, 336–37).
• /ŋ/ root-finally changes to [w] when non-back vowel-initial suffixes are added (Bartholomew and Engel 1987, 338).
• Word-final vowels tend to be deleted (Bartholomew and Engel 1987, 338–39).
• Vowel harmony is apparent in the language in terms of height (Bartholomew and Engel 1987, 340).

References

Bartholomew, Doris A., and Ralph Engel. 1987. “Gramática Zoque.” In Diccionario Zoque de Francisco León, edited by Ralph Engel and Mary Engel, 30:329–416. Vocabularios (Y Diccionarios) Indígenas ”Mariano Silva Y Aceves”. Mexico: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.