Chinantec of Ozumacín

Ozumacín Chinantec is a Chinantecan language of Mexico, spoken in northern Oaxaca in the towns of San Pedro Ozumacín, Ayotzintepec, Santiago Progreso.

Phonology

Vowels

There are ten vowels, which may be oral or nasal. A length distinction is made in writing by doubling the vowel, but this is based on comparison with other Chinantec languages; the distinction is apparently being lost from Ozumacín Chinantec.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	,
Mid	,
Open

Nasal vowels are written with an underscore, e.g. ji̱i̱ˊ 'bed'. This is not written after a nasal consonant, where there is no contrast with oral vowels.
The front rounded vowels arose historically from the influence of palatalized consonants on back vowels.

Consonants

Consonants and their orthography are as follows:
/p/ and /b/ are rare in native words. Apart from loans, /d/ occurs only in the enclitic daˊ, which softens an imperative. The letters c and f are used for Spanish borrowings.
/h/ merges with a following to produce.

Tones

Ozumacín Chinantec has nine tones. They are written as follows:

Tone	Example	Translation
high tone	tooˈ	metate
mid tone	tooˊ	mamey seed
low tone	tooˉ	banana
high ballistic tone	kooꜗ	will burn
mid ballistic tone	kooꜘ	next to
low ballistic tone	kooꜙ	is playing
high rising tone	juuhꜚ	pine
mid rising tone	juuh˜	is coughing
low rising tone	juuhˋ	cough!

Ballistic syllables are marked by a steep drop in pitch.

Writing system

Unicode support

The following diacritics are used to mark Ozumacín tones.

Sample text

A sample with all tone marks:
This orthography is used in the Ozumacín Bible.