Chaʼpalaa language

Chaʼpalaa (also known as Chachi or Cayapa) is a Barbacoan language spoken in northern Ecuador by ca. 9,000 ethnic Chachi people.^[1]

Chaʼpalaa
Region	Ecuador
Native speakers	5,870 (2012)[1]
Language family	Barbacoan Southern? Chaʼpalaa
Language codes
ISO 639-3	cbi
Glottolog	chac1249
ELP	Cha'palaa

"Chaʼpalaa" means "language of the Chachi people." This language was described in part by the missionary P. Alberto Vittadello, who, by the time his description was published in Guayaquil, Ecuador in 1988, had lived for seven years among the tribe.

Chaʼpalaa has agglutinative morphology, with a Subject-Object-Verb word order.

Chaʼpalaa is written using the Latin alphabet, making use of the following graphemes:

A, B, C, CH, D, DY, E, F, G, GU, HU, I, J, L, LL, M, N, Ñ, P, QU, R, S, SH, T, TS, TY, U, V, Y, and ʼ.

The writing system includes four simple vowels, and four double vowels:

Phonology

Cha'palaa has four vowels: /a, e, i, u/.^[2] Cha'palaa has 23 consonant phonemes.^[3][4]

Consonants

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Dorsal	Glottal
Nasal		m	n	ɲ
Stop	voiceless	p	t	tʲ	k	ʔ
	voiced	b	d	dʲ	g
Affricate			t͡s	t͡ʃ
Fricative		f	s	ʃ	χ
Glide			l	j	w
Liquid			ɾ	ʎ