Chontal

Church of San Pedro, Huamelula	December parade, Huamelula

General description
Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca is an indigenous language of southern Mexico, spoken primarily in and around San Pedro Huamelula and Santiago Astata, near the eastern coast of the state of Oaxaca. We estimate that there may be around 200 fluent first-language speakers, all older than 70, and perhaps another 750 semi-speakers, all older than 40, for whom Lowland Chontal is a first or second language. So far as we know, there are no monolinguals and no bilinguals in another indigenous language; instead, all speakers of Lowland Chontal are also speakers of Spanish.

The language is a variant of Chontal of Oaxaca, a small family of unclassified languages sometimes associated with the proposed Hokan stock, of the United States, and/or with the Jicaque family, of Honduras. There is a sister language, Highland Chontal, with some 3600 speakers and semi-speakers (www.ethnologue.com) in similarly endangered circumstances. The two languages are also called Huamelulteco or Coastal Chontal and Chontal of the Sierra, respectively. Some sources refer to Highland Chontal as Tequistlateco, but this is actually the name of a now-extinct third member of the Chontal family, once spoken near the town of Tequisistlán. Both Lowland and Highland Chontal were documented by linguists from the Summer Institute of Linguistics: Viola Waterhouse lived and worked periodically with speakers in the coastal lowlands from 1942 through the 1970s, and Paul and Shirley Turner worked in the highland communities 1959-1963. The lowland and highland varieties have developed individually for so many centuries that their differences make them mutually unintelligible, and they are considered different languages. Our project deals exclusively with Lowland Chontal.


It is worth noting that Chontal of Oaxaca is not related to Chontal of Tabasco, which is a Mayan language, or to Chontal of Guerrero, now extinct.

Attempts at genetic affiliation
There is disagreement as to the genetic classification of Chontal of Oaxaca, due to insufficient records for comparative work. Various linguists and anthropologists have reiterated an early designation of Chontal as part of the proposed Hokan stock (Kroeber 1915, Sapir 1918), which posits a genetic relationship among a group of language families and isolates of California and northwest Mexico. Suárez (1983) places Chontal of Oaxaca in the Tequistlatecan subgroup of a Tequistlatec-Jicaque family, proposed by Oltrogge (1977), following an attested affiliation of Jicaque and Hokan (Greenberg & Swadesh 1953).

In fact, the language does show some of the typological traits identified as characteristics of Hokan (Sapir 1929), such as agglutinative morphology, no case or inverse markers; an agentive (or ‘active-static’) system of person marking; and a distinctive typically two-part compound verb construction. However, Hokan itself is not universally accepted as a genuine genetic linguistic stock (Langdon & Jacobsen 1995, Mithun 1999:303-304), and the work to document candidate languages continues.

Very little is known about the language and culture of this group, as linguistic and anthropological studies are comparatively scarce. A systematic documentation of Lowland Chontal will contribute to the clarification of the proposed genetic groupings as well as to typological studies of Mesoamerican linguistics, agentive languages, and complex predicates. Documentation will also enrich areal studies to ascertain the likely historical movements of the Chontal people.

Romana García Aguilar	Arturo Pétriz Muñoz	Petrona Sosa García

Previous description and research
Pre-1940 documentation of Lowland Chontal consists of short wordlists (but see Belmar 1900 for a grammatical description of Highland Chontal). Subsequent linguistic studies of the language include several articles on grammatical and discourse features by Waterhouse (1949, 1949, 1957, 1961, 1962, 1967, 1969, 1976, 1985, 1985, and with others 1950, 1968), as well as O’Connor’s own work (1999, 2000, 2000, 2000, 2004, 2004, in review, in review, and with others, in review, submitted). Waterhouse and O’Connor are the only linguists in recent memory to have done primary fieldwork in the Lowland Chontal-speaking community. Waterhouse produced some booklets for primary education and translated portions of the New Testament, but these materials are not in general circulation. Nearly all of Waterhouse’s work is in a tagmemic framework, not readily accessible to linguists or to the Chontal-speaking communities. 

The creation of a practical orthography has presented constant challenges. Recent work in phonetics has improved our understanding of the phonemic inventory and of the consequences of certain phonological processes (Maddieson, Avelino & O’Connor, submitted; see more discussion below). The alphabet requires representation of glottalized stops, nasals and fricatives; voiceless laterals and nasals, and palatalized alveolars. O’Connor helped standardize the orthography again through a series of workshops and meetings in 1997-98, but spelling still varies and the Chontals are insecure about writing their own language when the sounds deviate from familiar Spanish sounds. 

Alberto Espinoza López	and daughters Eulalia, Adelaida, and Selsa Espinoza Raymundo

Current sociolinguistic situation
Today, Lowland Chontal is a highly endangered language. There were about 950 self-declared Lowland Chontal speakers among the perhaps 15,000 ethnic Chontals identified in the 1990 census. According to a subsequent count performed by the Indigenous National Institute in the late 1990s, there are around 200 fluent speakers, all in their 70s, 80s and 90s, and a much larger community of semi-speakers with various levels of linguistic ability. It is very likely that within the next two decades, Lowland Chontal will have disappeared as a fluently spoken language.

There are no known monolinguals in Lowland Chontal. No children learn it as a first language, and very few have access to any type of bilingual education. The present sociolinguistic situation is dominated by Spanish, the language that pervades the media, the school system, the workplace, the government, and the home. Furthermore, Chontals must speak Spanish to participate fully in the larger national society. Most elderly Chontals are not literate in any language. Semi-speakers literate in Chontal are also literate in Spanish. Most children and young adults are literate in Spanish.

Although some Chontals call the indigenous language el dialecto ‘the dialect’, a term which can carry a pejorative sense, O’Connor would generalize that most are proud of the language.

Chontal ladies	Chontal ladies

Transmission of the language was actively discouraged in the education system until rather recently, and the bilingual education programs that exist at least nominally in several villages are challenged by small budgets, teachers with minimal training, and a general lack of linguistic materials. Currently the language is used in ritual speech related to harvest, weather, and well-being, where it is respected as a badge of ethnic authenticity. Fluent conversation in Chontal is rare in the public domain, yet simple greetings or observations made in the indigenous tongue typically provoke responses in the same language. Elementary school students are taught extracts of Chontal poetry or song to then perform in competitions.

Inéz Zavaleta and her after-school class

Enterprising second-language speakers have produced a CD or two of popular music and a CD of children singing Chontal translations of Mexican patriotic songs.

Typological profile and some interesting typological features
Chontal is a verb-initial head-marking language, with variable word order, a complex system of aspect, and no case or tense markers. Constituents like numbers, adjectives, prepositions, and what seems to be a determiner precede the noun; relativizers and relative clauses follow the noun. Chontal is a predominantly synthetic language in that derivational and inflectional morphemes bind to roots to form single words. Agglutination is the most common word-building strategy, and most words are easily analyzable into recognizable morphemes, which include roots, affixes and clitics. Nominal morphology is mostly prefixing, and verbal morphology is mostly suffixing. Chontal has a few infixes, which are inserted into the nominal or verbal root. Most nouns and verbs are synthetic, formed of a root plus a variety of affixes. Clitics attach to either end of various classes of words; they attach to each other, forming polyclitic words, and they can occur alone.

Chontal has three sets of resources for marking grammatical person. The major person-marking paradigm is an agentive system motivated by the perceived volition or control of the participant over a change of state. Morphemes in the AGT series of person markers can occur as free pronouns but more often occur as clitics, to verbs, particles, or other clitics. Third persons have no AGT markers but can be expressed lexically or as polyclitic pronouns. The PAT series of person markers are verbal affixes that reference non-agentive participants. Third person singular has no PAT marker, and therefore the agentive vs. non-agentive distinction is neutralized for this person. Morphemes in the POSS series constitute a minor person-marking strategy, as nominal prefixes that express the single participant of intransitives of possession or attribution.

Spanish words have entered the language as nouns, a few verbs, and especially as closed-class grammatical morphology.

Sara de León, Adelaida Espinoza, Columba Ramírez, Antonia Pomposo

Three interesting typological characteristics of Chontal are 1) the agentive system, 2) compound stem predicates, and 3) glottalization patterns in the sound system.

1. The agentive system
The agentive system in Lowland Chontal is motivated by the perceived volition or control of a participant that undergoes a change of state. Non-agentive morphology in Chontal occurs in situations that require or permit a non-agentive participant. In expressions of multi-participant events, it marks the less agentive of two core participants. In single-participant events, it indicates a change of state outside the volition or intention of the participant. In broader terms, the formal pattern with intransitives marks any ‘transformation’, a supertype category that encompasses situations of prefatory phase, resulting state, and involuntary response, as well as the moment of change itself. The lack of agency can be inherent in the event, such as in dying (1).

(1)a.    ma-’m-ola’
    die-IPFV-3P.PAT
    ‘They are going to die, they might die, they will probably die.’

b.    ma–na-p-ola’
    die-TERM-PFV-3P.PAT
    ‘They died, they have just died, they are dead.’


In other situations, agency can be attributed or perceived by the speaker, as in (2). In (a), the outcome of suffering is not yet known; the predication is imperfective and non-agentive, to reflect the ongoing nature of the situation and the lack of control on the part of the participant. In (b), the predicate is inflected as perfective and agentive: the critical moment of survival has passed, the event is bounded and complete, and the participant is expressed as agentive or volitional.

(2)a.    injko    maygo-’m-onga’    jo    ma-’m-onga’
    who.knows    survive-IPFV-1P.PAT    or    die-IPFV-1P.PAT
    ‘Who knows if we will get well or we’ll die.’

b.    tonjsal’e    iya’    maygo-pa
    like.this    1S.AGT    survive-PFV.SG
    ‘This is what I endured, what I went through.’ 


Although Chontal is not a “Fluid-S” language, in Dixon’s (1979) terminology, in which speakers choose freely between the two types of person marking for any intransitive verb, speakers have a degree of flexibility in expressing certain events as agentive or non-agentive. Example (3) presents two ways to say, “you were late.” The first, with non-agentive morphology, indicates that the tardiness is not your fault, while the second, with agentive morphology, indicates that you did have control over the situation and could have arrived on time.

(3)a.    xux-kix-p-o’
    be.late-AND-PFV-2S.PAT
    ‘You were late.’  (this was beyond your control) 

b.    xux-kix-pa=yma’
    be.late-AND-PFV.SG=2S.AGT
    ‘You were late.’  (you could have been faster) 

Non-agentive morphology is the marked case in Chontal, identifying the single participant as in some way non-volitional. The converse does not hold for agentive marking, which can be used to reference participants unmarked for agentivity. These include, for example, the agentively marked single participant of a stative predicate. The class of intransitive predicates marked for ‘transformation’ in Chontal, i.e. those that occur with a non-agentive person marker, is a relatively small class within the entire verbal inventory. Merlan (1985) found this to be the norm among the eight “split intransitive” languages in her study. “The relative size of the lexical classes provides a basis for speaking of distributionally marked vs. unmarked intransitive inflectional forms within each language” (326). In Chontal, non-agentive predicates represent the marked case, both distributionally and semantically.

Anacleto Castro Méndez

2. Compound stem predicates
In one type of complex predicate in Chontal, two or more verbal elements combine to form a compound stem that expresses a change of location, a change of position, or a change of state. These compound stems have one aspectual inflection and one set of arguments, and they can predicate single- and multi-participant events.

The compound stems are formed of two types of verbal elements, each of which makes a particular contribution to the meaning of the construction. The basic template of the predicate is:

            V1  –  DTR  –  INFLECTION

The initial verbal element, called V1, comes from a class of about 100 verb roots and verbal elements and specifies:
"    something about the change event itself
        the means (process or cause) of change
        the trajectory (path shape) of motion
"    or something about the participants
        the class (size, shape, type) of the figure or ground
        the disposition (posture or configuration) of the figure

The second element, of direction or topological relation (DTR), comes from a closed class of 10-15 verbal elements. Some of these are verbs in the language today, but most are not. The DTR denotes:
"    directional motion (up, down, across)
"    topological relation (in, on, inside, out, upon)
"    the end-state of a change of state (apart, realized)

Not all V1s combine with all DTRs, and sometimes two DTRs can follow a single V1.

Compound stem predicates play important roles in event construal, performing an adverbial function, tracking referents, and expressing mandatory spatial detail. For instance, examples (4)-(6) were taken from the same text on the planting of corn. Each predicate is composed of a V1 plus –‘mi, a DTR that means ‘in, on’, and each V1 depicts a different way of manipulating corn.

(4) faj’mi- ‘plant into’ is used for the event of broadcasting seeds into a cornfield
(5) tye’mi- ‘drop into’ is used for the event of trickling kernels into a furrow
(6) ch’u’mi- ‘move grain into’ is used for the event of pouring corn into a small pot

(4)    joypa    sa=ge    may-’ma    sa=ge    faj-’mi-tya
    already    DEM=person    go-IPFV.SG    DEM=person    plant-in-DLOC.SG

    sa    layñega
    DEM    cornfield
    ‘Then he will go off to plant the cornfield.’

(5)    tye-’mi-’ma    sa    fane    la’wa-kosak’
    fall-in-IPFV.SG    DEM    three    DIM-corn
    ‘He will trickle in three corn kernels (into the furrow).’

(6)    tyijpe    sa    ch’u-’mi-’ma    sa    li-kosak’
    there    DEM    grain-in-IPFV.SG    DEM    his-corn
    ‘He puts his corn in there (in the gourd container tied to his belt).’

In (4) and (5), the means V1 also suggests a particular type of ground referent, whether broad field or narrow hole, while in (6), the classificatory V1 simply tells us that corn is being moved.

In Chontal, you can’t just say “it’s on the table”... without also specifying the disposition of the figure, whether posture (a), (b), (c) or configuration (d); the class of the figure (e); or the trajectory of the motion that placed the figure (f).

(a)    jola-f’-a    (b)    kasa-f’-a    (c)    ña-f’-a
    sitting-up-STAT.SG        standing-up-STAT.SG        lying-up-STAT.SG
    of a pot            of a bottle            of a pencil

(d)    xpe-f’-a    (e)    ch’u-f’-a    (f)    ’oy-f’-a
    spread-up-STAT.SG        corn-up-STAT.SG        flat.arc-up-STAT.SG
    of a pile of dried beans    of corn                of anything!

Particular types of functional motivation are suggested by the distribution of compound stem predicates in discourse. Chontal is a language without a productive process for forming adverbs (on the order of –ly in English or –mente in Spanish), but the adverbial function of compound stem predicates partially fills this gap. On the same note, Chontal has no third person pronouns, but referents can be tracked by many of the compound stems. These apparent typological correlations of form and function can be tested across languages. In addition, the predominantly two-part construction in Chontal represents a semantic and grammatical subset of the ‘bipartite stem’ construction described in Washo (Jacobsen 1980) and in Klamath (DeLancey 1996, 1996, 1999, 2003), both languages also identified as candidates for a proposed Hokan stock.
 

Crysanthemums on a bus, getting ready for All Saints´Day	Gabriel Rey Reyes

3. Glottalization patterns in the sound system
Lowland Chontal was famously described as having the largest number of phonemes and the most complex subsystems of laterals, nasals and glides in Mesoamerica (Suarez 1983:31, 36-7, based on descriptions by Waterhouse 1962, 1967 and Waterhouse and Morrison 1950). Recent work in phonetics (Maddieson, Avelino & O Connor, submitted) has taken some steps toward clarifying this picture. Although a complete analysis of all contrasts could not be carried out, sufficient data were processed to support the proposal of a tidier phonemic inventory and to motivate several findings about the place of Chontal in the cross-linguistic picture. The inventory of glottalized consonant phonemes is presented below.




The picture is complicated – or enlivened, according to one’s perspective – by palatalization of alveolars, for the most part in predictable phonetic and grammatical environments, and by the fact that variation in pronunciation is rampant, between local dialects, between speakers, and even in the speech of individual speakers. We assume that infrequent use of this endangered language contributes to the level of variation.

The complex inventory of consonants has ramifications for the orthography. In the practical orthography currently in use, both secondary articulation and true glottal stop consonants are written with < ’ >. With obstruents, the glottal is written after the other segment, as < f’, s’, ts’, ch’, jl’, k’ >, and with sonorants, the glottal is written before the segment, as < ’m, ’n, ’l, ’w >. 

Part of O’Connor’s documentation task is to record as many untested contrasts as possible so that detailed instrumental work can continue.

Columba Ramírez	Hermenegilda García Trinidad