| Region | Ecuador |
|---|---|
| Speakers | 5,870 |
| Date | 2012 |
| Ref | e25 |
| Familycolor | American |
| Fam 1 | Barbacoan |
| Fam 2 | Southern? |
| Iso 3 | cbi |
| Glotto | chac1249 |
| Glottorefname | Chaʼpalaa |
| Altname | Cayapa, Chachi |
| Nativename | Chaʼpalaa |
Chaʼpalaa (also known as Chachi or Cayapa) is a Barbacoan language spoken in northern Ecuador by around 5,870 Chachi people.[1]
Name
"Chaʼpalaa" means "language of the Chachi people."
Documentation
This language was described in part by the missionary P. Alberto Vittadello, who, by the time his description was published in Guayaquil, Ecuador in 1988, had lived for seven years among the tribe.
Phonology
Vowels
Cha'palaa has four vowels: /a, e, i, u/.[2]
Consonants
Cha'palaa has 23 consonant phonemes.[3][4]
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Dorsal | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | |||
| Stop | voiceless | p | t | tʲ | k | ʔ |
| voiced | b | d | dʲ | g | ||
| Affricate | t͡s | t͡ʃ | ||||
| Fricative | f | s | ʃ | χ | ||
| Glide | l | j | w | |||
| Liquid | ɾ | ʎ | ||||
Writing system
Chaʼpalaa is written using the Latin alphabet, making use of the following graphemes:
A, B, C, CH, D, DY, E, F, G, GU, HU, I, J, L, LL, M, N, Ñ, P, QU, R, S, SH, T, TS, TY, U, V, Y, and .
The writing system includes four simple vowels, and four double vowels:
Morphology
Chaʼpalaa has agglutinative morphology, with a Subject-Object-Verb word order.
References
- ^ e25
- ^ Floyd, Simeon (9 June 2015). "Other-initiated repair in Cha'palaa". DeGruyter. Open Linguistics.
- ^ Floyd, Simeon (2014). "Four Types of Reduplication in the Cha'palaa Language of Ecuador". Voort-Goodwin.
- ^ Lindskoog, John & Brend, Ruth M. (1975). Fonémica cayapa. In M. Catherine Peeke (ed.), Estudios fonológicos de lenguas vernáculas del Ecuador: Quito: Ministerio de Educación Pública and Instituto Lingüístico de Verano. pp. 8–20.