Sayula Popoluca

Sayula Popoluca
Sayultec
Native to Mexico
Region Vera Cruz
Native speakers
3,400  (2007)[1]
Mixe–Zoque
  • Mixean

    • Sayula Popoluca
Language codes
ISO 639-3 pos
Glottolog sayu1241[2]

Sayula Popoluca, also called Sayultec, is a Mixe language spoken by around 4,000 indigenous people in and around the town of Sayula de Alemán in the southern part of the state of Veracruz, Mexico. Almost all published research on the language has been the work of Lawrence E. Clark of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. More recent studies of Sayula Popoluca have been conducted by Dennis Holt (lexico-semantics) and Richard Rhodes (morphology and syntax), but few of their findings have been published.

'Popoluca' is the Castilian alteration of the Nahuatl word popoloca, meaning 'barbarians' or 'people speaking a foreign language'.[1] In Mexico, the name 'popoluca' is a traditional name for three different Mixe-Zoquean languages, and the name 'Sierra Popoloca' is a traditional name for a totally unrelated language belonging to the Oto-Manguean languages.

Natively it is known as yamay ajw 'local language' or tʉcmay-ajw 'language of the home'.[1]

Phonology

Bilabial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Plosives b, p d, t ɡ, k ʔ
Fricatives s ʃ h
Affricates ts,
Nasals m n
Approximants w l, r j

Notes

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 Sistema de Información Cultural 2007.
  2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Sayula Popoluca". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Bibliography