Enxet language

Enxet, also known as Enxet Sur or Southern Lengua, is a language spoken by the Indigenous southern Enxet people of Presidente Hayes Department, Paraguay. It is one of twenty languages spoken by the wider Gran Chaco Amerindians of South America.^[3] Once considered a dialect of a broader language, known as Vowak or Powok, Enxet (Southern Lengua) and Enlhet (Northern Lengua) diverged as extensive differences between the two were realized.^[4]

Enxet
Southern Lengua
Énxet nempeywa
Pronunciation	[eːnɬet]
Native to	Paraguay
Region	Presidente Hayes
Ethnicity	5,840 Enxet Sur people (2002 census)[1]
Native speakers	3,800 (2002 census)[2]
Language family	Mascoian Enxet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	enx
Glottolog	sout2989
ELP	Enxet Sur

Classification

Enxet belongs to the Enlhet-Enenlhet (aka Mascoian) language family, a small family of languages spoken in the Paraguayan region of the South American Gran Chaco.^[4] Enxet is most closely related to its sister language Enlhet, based on some preliminary analysis, but a substantial historical analysis of the Enlhet-Enenlhet family has not yet been published.

History

Enxet and Enlhet were once considered dialects of a single language known as Lengua.^[4] The Enxet language was first documented in the late nineteenth century by explorers from Spain.^[5]

Language contents and structure

Enxet contains only three phonemic vowel qualities /e,a,o/, each requiring a certain length such to maximize distinction. Bilingual speakers of Spanish and Enxet purportedly utilize shorter spacing between vowels when speaking Enxet compared to Spanish.^[6]

Phonology

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Mid	e eː		o oː
Open		a aː

Phoneme	Allophone
/e/	[e], [i], [ɛ]
/o/	[o], [ʊ], [ɔ]

Consonants

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Plosive		p	t	cʲ	k	q	ʔ
Affricate				tʃ
Fricative			s				h
Nasal		m	n	ɲ	ŋ
Lateral	approximant		l
	fricative		ɬ
Semivowel				j	w

/cʲ/ can also be heard as a regular palatal stop [c] or a palatalized velar stop [kʲ] in free variation.^[7]

Further reading

• Campbell, Lyle (2013). "Language Contact and Linguistic Change in the Chaco". Revista Brasileira de Linguística Antropológica. 5 (2): 259–292. doi:10.26512/rbla.v5i2.16268.
• Messineo, Cristina; Cúneo, Paola (2011). "Ethnobiological Classification in Two Indigenous Languages of the Gran Chaco Region: Toba (Guaycuruan) and Maká (Mataco-Mataguayan)". Anthropological Linguistics. 53 (2): 132–169. doi:10.1353/anl.2011.0010. S2CID 143781977.
• Hammarström, H. (2014). Basic vocabulary comparison in South American languages. The Native Languages of South America: Origins, Development, Typology, 56.
• Kidd, Stephen W. (1995). "Land, Politics and Benevolent Shamanism: The Enxet Indians in a Democratic Paraguay". Journal of Latin American Studies. 27 (1): 43–75. doi:10.1017/S0022216X00010166.
• Klein, Harriet Manelis; Stark, Louisa R. (1977). "Indian Languages of the Paraguayan Chaco". Anthropological Linguistics. 19 (8): 378–401. JSTOR 30027605.
• Langer, Erick D. (2001). "Peoples of the Gran Chaco". American Ethnologist. 28 (1): 249–251. doi:10.1525/ae.2001.28.1.249.