Enxet, also known as Enxet Sur or Southern Lengua, is a language spoken by the Indigenous southern Enxet people of Presidente Hayes Department, Paraguay. It is one of twenty languages spoken by the wider Gran Chaco Amerindians of South America.[3] Once considered a dialect of a broader language, known as Vowak or Powok, Enxet (Southern Lengua) and Enlhet (Northern Lengua) diverged as extensive differences between the two were realized.[4]
Classification
Enxet belongs to the Enlhet-Enenlhet (aka Mascoian) language family, a small family of languages spoken in the Paraguayan region of the South American Gran Chaco.[4] Enxet is most closely related to its sister language Enlhet, based on some preliminary analysis, but a substantial historical analysis of the Enlhet-Enenlhet family has not yet been published.
History
Enxet and Enlhet were once considered dialects of a single language known as Lengua.[4] The Enxet language was first documented in the late nineteenth century by explorers from Spain.[5]
Language contents and structure
Enxet contains only three phonemic vowel qualities /e,a,o/, each requiring a certain length such to maximize distinction. Bilingual speakers of Spanish and Enxet purportedly utilize shorter spacing between vowels when speaking Enxet compared to Spanish.[6]
Phonology
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid | e eː | o oː | |
| Open | a aː |
| Phoneme | Allophone |
|---|---|
| /e/ | [e], [i], [ɛ] |
| /o/ | [o], [ʊ], [ɔ] |
Consonants
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | p | t | cʲ | k | q | ʔ | |
| Affricate | tʃ | ||||||
| Fricative | s | h | |||||
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | |||
| Lateral | approximant | l | |||||
| fricative | ɬ | ||||||
| Semivowel | j | w | |||||
/cʲ/ can also be heard as a regular palatal stop [c] or a palatalized velar stop [kʲ] in free variation.[7]
Further reading
- Campbell, Lyle (2013). "Language Contact and Linguistic Change in the Chaco". Revista Brasileira de Linguística Antropológica. 5 (2): 259–292. doi:10.26512/rbla.v5i2.16268.
- Messineo, Cristina; Cúneo, Paola (2011). "Ethnobiological Classification in Two Indigenous Languages of the Gran Chaco Region: Toba (Guaycuruan) and Maká (Mataco-Mataguayan)". Anthropological Linguistics. 53 (2): 132–169. doi:10.1353/anl.2011.0010. S2CID 143781977.
- Hammarström, H. (2014). Basic vocabulary comparison in South American languages. The Native Languages of South America: Origins, Development, Typology, 56.
- Kidd, Stephen W. (1995). "Land, Politics and Benevolent Shamanism: The Enxet Indians in a Democratic Paraguay". Journal of Latin American Studies. 27 (1): 43–75. doi:10.1017/S0022216X00010166.
- Klein, Harriet Manelis; Stark, Louisa R. (1977). "Indian Languages of the Paraguayan Chaco". Anthropological Linguistics. 19 (8): 378–401. JSTOR 30027605.
- Langer, Erick D. (2001). "Peoples of the Gran Chaco". American Ethnologist. 28 (1): 249–251. doi:10.1525/ae.2001.28.1.249.
References
- ^ ISO change request
- ^ Enxet at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
- ^ Brenzinger, M. (2008). Language Diversity Endangered (1st ed.). Walter De Gruyter.
- ^ a b c Campbell, Lyle; Grondona, Verónica, eds. (2012). The Indigenous Languages of South America: A Comprehensive Guide. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
- ^ Quevedo, Samuel A. Lufone (1893). "Languages of the Gran Chaco". Science. 21 (524): 95. doi:10.1126/science.ns-21.524.95-b. JSTOR 1765332. PMID 17736781.
- ^ Elliott, John (2016). "For bilinguals, Enxet vowel spaces smaller than Spanish". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 140 (4): 3107. Bibcode:2016ASAJ..140Q3107E. doi:10.1121/1.4969702.
- ^ Elliott, John A. (2021). A Grammar of Enxet Sur. University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.
External links
- ELAR collection: The Enxet documentation project deposited by John Elliott
- Lengua (Intercontinental Dictionary Series)
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