Upper Necaxa Totonac is a native American language of central Mexico spoken by 3,400 people in and around four villages— Chicontla, Patla, Cacahuatlán, and San Pedro Tlaloantongo —in the Necaxa River Valley in Northern Puebla State. Although speakers represent the majority of the adult population in Patla and Cacahuatlán, there are very few monolinguals and few if any children are currently learning the language as a mother tongue, and, as a consequence, the language must be considered severely endangered.
Phonology
In some respects, Upper Necaxa has a fairly typical Totonacan consonantal inventory, lacking a voice/voiceless opposition in stops and having the three lateral phonemes /l/, //, and //, although the lateral affricate // has largely been replaced by the voiceless lateral fricative //, persisting in word-final position in only a few lexical items.
The Upper Necaxan inventory is also notable in the family in that it lacks a uvular stop /q/ but contains a robust glottal stop phoneme, derived historically from *q. The loss of *q also resulted in the collapse of fricative + uvular sequences—*sq, *q, and *q—to ejective fricatives at the same point of articulation (i.e., s’, ’, and ’).
The vowel inventory is also somewhat different from most other members of the family, having full phonemic mid-vowels.
Although most examples of /e/ and /o/ are conditioned, at least diachronically, by adjacency to // (historically, *q) and, to a lesser extent, to /y/ and /x/, there are nevertheless enough instances of both without the conditioning environment that the vowels have to be considered phonemic.
Morphology
Like other Totonacan languages, Upper Necaxa is a highly polysynthetic agglutinating language, making extensive use of both prefixes and suffixes for inflection, quasi-inflection, and derivation. The verb has nine relatively ordered prefixal “slots” and fourteen positions for suffixes. These positions are determined simply by the relative order in which co-occurring affixes can appear on the verb and do not correlate with semantically or functionally defined categories. Several affixes can appear in more than one position in the template, depending on various formal, semantic, and stylistic factors, and one position, suffix position 2, can accommodate more than one affix, the suffixes that can occupy this position being variably ordered with respect to one another.
Verbal inflection
Upper Necaxa dynamic verbs are inflected for three tenses (past, present, future), four aspects (imperfective, perfective, perfect, progressive), and four moods (indicative, optative, potential, irrealis). The tenses are marked exclusively by prefixes in the past and future and by a zero in the present, while three of the fours aspects (imperfective, perfective, and perfect) are marked by suffixes. The fourth aspect, the progressive, is realized through the use of inflectional compounds formed on the stative verb ma ‘be lying’. The indicative mood is zero-marked while the optative and potential are marked by the prefixes ka- and t-, respectively; the fourth mood, the irrealis, is marked by idiomatic combinations of morphemes borrowed from other parts of the TAM paradigms. Stative verbs are marked for tense and mood, but lack aspectual inflections.
Person-marking on the verb is complex, the verb agreeing in person and number with the subject and up to two objects. The table below shows the indicative perfective form of the transitive verb tks- ‘hit sth’:
{ | class="wikitable" |- ! !! 1sg.obj !! 2sg.obj !! 3sg.obj !! 1pl.obj !! 2pl.obj !! 3pl.obj |- | 1sg.sub || — || ktksn || ktksl || — || ktksn || ktksl |- | 2sg.sub || kintkst || — || tkst || kiltksw || — || ktkst |- | 3sg.su || kintksl || tksn || tksl || kinktksn || ktksn || ktksl |- | 1plexc.sub || — || ktksn || ktksw || — || ktksn || ktksw |- | 1plincl.sub || — || — || tksw || — || — || ktksw |- | 2pl.sub || kiltksw || — || tkstit || kiltksw || — || ktkstit |- | 3pl.sub || kintatksl || tatksn || tatksl || kinktatksn || ktatksn || tatksn/ktksl |}
Like other members of the family, the Upper Necaxa verb paradigms show some irregularities in forms where first and second persons interact and one or both of these persons is plural, leading to a three-way ambiguity in such expressions:
A further wrinkle is that in clauses with third person plural subjects and third person plural objects, only one of these can be marked on the verb (see the bottom right cell in the paradigm given above).
Double object-marking is rare, and occurs only in clauses with both a singular first-person and a singular second person object: