Tlahuitoltepec Mixe, called South Highland Mixe in Wichmann (1995), is a Mixe language spoken in Mexico.
South Highland Mixe consists of a core dialect, spoken in the towns of Tlahuitoltepec, San Pedro y San Pablo Ayutla, and Tamazulapan, with divergent dialects in Tepuxtepec, Tepantlali, and Mixistlán. It is a polysynthetic language with head marking and an inverse system.
The language in the community
The following description is based on the language as spoken in Ayutla, which is known as Tukyo’m Ayuujk in the language.
Mendez states that 3,617 communicated in Ayutla Mixe in 2005. The number who were monolingual started decreasing after 1960. The children from San Pedro y San Pablo Ayutla do not speak fluently as their parents because schools only offered instruction in Spanish. In his paper, Romero Mendez states that the Mixe languages including Ayutla Mixe, shares features that relates to the Mayan languages. According to Romero Mendez, there are only a small number of people who still wear traditional clothing which consists mostly of women. In his paper, Romero Mendez states " All the Catholic celebrations are observed in Ayutla, including Easter, the Day of the Dead, and Christmas". A current issue happening in the Ayutla community is their fight for proper access to water. In Agua Para Ayutla Ya, Ordena Juez, Pedro Matias states that the governor of Oaxaca, Alejandro Murat Hinojosa, has not restored the water pipeline that would provide access to water despite being ordered to do so by a federal judge. The Ayutla Mixe community is where Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil comes from and she is a well known linguist. In The Map and the Territory, Yásnaya mentions that people from the Ayutla Mixe community who migrate to the United States believe that the spirit of their community is being recreated in places that are away from their home.
Phonology
This phonology is from the Ayulta dialect. Ayutla Mixe has a total of 12 consonants and seven vowels.
Consonants
The language does not have any liquid sounds; for instance, there are no /l/ or /r/ sounds used in their words. However, both /l/ and /r/ my be used in Spanish loan words.
Below are some examples of consonants and their sounds.
Vowels
Below are some examples of vowels and their sounds. These examples show how the change in specific letters can change the meaning of the word.
Plural
In the plural nominal morphology a noun doesn't need to take plural form and if it does there needs to be a human to which a phrase refers. The plural suffix is -tëjk in Ayutla Mixe.
Possessive morphology
In Ayutla Mixe it expresses possessive morphology by adding the following prefix n - first person singular, m - second person singular, y- third person singular.
Romero - Mendez lists the following examples:
n-uk ‘my dog’
m-uk ‘your dog’
y-uk ‘his dog’
There are no articles in Ayutla language to define definiteness.
Adjectives
Adjectives are modifiers that can help modify a noun. The adjective can be found after the noun, non-verbal predication, secondary prediction, and it rarely found inside the noun phrase.
Romero - Mendez lists the adjective between the noun and demonstrative below:
Number and numerals in the noun phrase
In Rodrigo Romero - Mendez dissertation paper, A Reference Grammar of Ayutla Mixe (Tukyo’m Ayuujk), states, "The NP jä’äy ‘person’ in (42) can be interpreted as having a singular or plural referent.".
The examples listed below by the author, Rodrigo Romero- Mendez, are cardinal numerals or ordinal numerals.
Possession in NPs
In order to show possession in a noun phrase, a possessive prefix needs to be placed on the noun its possessing and whoever is doing the possession needs to be before the head noun.
The author, Romero - Mendez, gives an example of a possession in a noun phrase below:
Prefix that shows possession: yë’ë
The author, Romero - Mendez, gives an example of a head noun only possession below:
Verbal Morphology
When the inflectional morphology is removed, one is left with the verb stem. The verbal template = verb stem - then person prefix - then aspect-mood suffix. All the possible verbal slots in Ayutla Mixe:
Word order
The order of the subject with respect to the object or the verb, does not cipher grammatical relations, which makes Mixe a fairly flexible word order of components.