Trique phonology

The following phonology is based on Hollenbach (1984) and DiCanio (2008):

Vowels

	Front	Back
Close	i ĩ	u ũ
Mid	e ẽ	o õ
Open	a ã

Consonants

		Labial	Alveolar	Post- alveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Labio- velar	Glottal
Plosive	voiceless	p	t				k	kʷ	ʔ
	voiced	b	d				ɡ	ɡʷ
	prenasal	(mb)	nd				ŋɡ	ŋɡʷ
Affricate			t͡s	t͡ʃ	ʈ͡ʂ	c͡ɲ
Fricative	voiceless		s	ʃ	ʂ				h
	voiced	β	z	ʒ	ʐ
Nasal		m	n
Rhotic			r
Lateral			l
Approximant						j		w

Itunyoso Triqui may tend to have ten geminated consonants; /mː, βː, tː, nː, lː, tːʃ, jː, ʈːʂ, kː, kːʷ/.

All varieties of Triqui are tonal and have complex phonologies. The tone system of Copala Triqui is the best described and has eight tones.

Tones in Triqui languages are typically written with superscript numbers, so that chraa⁵ 'river' indicates the syllable chraa with the highest (5) tone, while cha³na¹ 'woman' has the middle (3) tone on the first syllable and the lowest (1) tone on the second syllable.

Of the Triqui languages, the Copala dialect has undergone the most vowel loss, with many non-final syllables losing their vowels. The result, as in many other Oto-Manguean languages, is a complex set of consonant clusters. So, for instance, the word si⁵kuj⁵ 'cow' in Itunyoso Triqui corresponds to skuj⁵ in Copala Triqui.

The tonal phonology of other Triqui languages is more complex than Copala Triqui. The tone system of Itunyoso Triqui has nine tones. The tone system of Chicahuaxtla Triqui has at least 10 tones but may have as many as 16.

External links

• Trique language