Uspantek language

Uspantek is a Mayan language of Guatemala, closely related to Kʼicheʼ. It is spoken in the Uspantán and Playa Grande Ixcán municipios, in the Department El Quiché. It is also one of only four Mayan languages to have developed contrastive tone. It distinguishes between vowels with high tone and vowels with low tone.

Phonology

Consonants

There are 24 consonants in Uspantek including the glottal stop.

Vowels

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

	Front	Central	Back
Close
Mid
Open

Tone

Uspantek has two phonemic tones: high and falling. In writing, the high tone is represented by an acute accent mark on the vowel, and the falling tone is represented by an acute accent mark on the first vowel followed by an unmarked vowel.
The high tone occurs in penultimate syllables when the final syllable contains a short vowel. Additionally, it occurs the following contexts.

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.

Monosyllabic words
Final syllable of a polysyllabic word

Phonotactics

The main types of syllable structures in Uspantek are CVC, CV, and CCVC.

Literature

Can Pixabaj, Telma Angelina, et al. 2007. Gramática uspanteka . Guatemala: Cholsamaj.
Tuyuc Sucuc, Cecilio. 2001. Vocabulario uspanteko . Guatemala: Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala, Comunidad Lingüística Uspanteka.
Vicente Méndez, Miguel Angel. 2007. Diccionario bilingüe uspanteko-español . Guatemala: Cholsamaj.