Uspantek language

For any other use, see Uspantek (disambiguation).

Uspantek (Uspanteco, Uspanteko, Uspantec) is a Mayan language of Guatemala, closely related to Kʼicheʼ. It is spoken in the Uspantán and Playa Grande Ixcán^[2] municipios, in the Department El Quiché.^[1][3][4] It is also one of only three Mayan languages to have developed contrastive tone (the others being Yukatek and one dialect of Tzotzil). It distinguishes between vowels with high tone and vowels with low tone.

Uspantek
Uspanteco
Uspanteko
Native to	Guatemala
Region	Quiché (department)
Ethnicity	Uspantek
Native speakers	5,100 (2019 census)[1]
Language family	Mayan Quichean–Mamean Greater Quichean Uspantek
Language codes
ISO 639-3	usp
Glottolog	uspa1245
ELP	Uspanteko

Phonology

Consonants

There are 24 consonants in Uspantek including the glottal stop.^[5][6]

		Bilabial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar		Uvular	Glottal
						Plain	Palatalized
Nasal		m	n
Plosive	Plain	p	t			k	kʲ	q	ʔ
	Glottalized/Implosive	pˀ~ɓ̥~ɓ	tˀ~ɗ̥			kˀ~ɠ̊	kˀʲ	qˀ~ʛ̥
Affricate	Plain		t͡s	t͡ʃ
	Glottalized		t͡sˀ	t͡ʃˀ
Fricative			s	ʃ				χ
Trill/Flap			r~ɾ
Approximant			l		j	w

Vowels

There are 5 vowels in Uspantek and they contrast in vowel length.^[5]

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i iː		u uː
Mid	e eː		o oː
Open		a aː

Tone

Uspantek has two phonemic tones: high and falling (Can Pixabaj 2007:39). In writing, the high tone is represented by an acute accent mark on the vowel (ráqan 'my foot'), and the falling tone is represented by an acute accent mark on the first vowel followed by an unmarked vowel (júun 'one').

The high tone occurs in penultimate syllables when the final syllable contains a short vowel. Additionally, it occurs the following contexts (Can Pixabaj 2007).

• Most possessive forms of inalienable nouns
• Bisyllabic single morphemes, especially those with short /a/ or /i/ in the final syllable
• Intransitive verbs with the suffix -ik
• Most words with three syllables
• Loanwords

The following types of words do not have tone.

• Words with CVʼC structure do not add tone to penultimate syllables when affixes are added.
• Monosyllabic words with long vowels that have no tone do not add tone to penultimate syllables when affixes are added.

The falling tone occurs in long vowels, and in the following contexts (Can Pixabaj 2007).

• Monosyllabic words
• Final syllable of a polysyllabic word

Phonotactics

The main types of syllable structures in Uspantek are CVC, CV, and CCVC (Can Pixabaj 2007:50).