Sayula Popoluca

Sayula Popoluca, also called Sayultec, is a Mixe language spoken by around 4,000 indigenous people in and around the town of Sayula de Alemán in the southern part of the state of Veracruz, Mexico. Almost all published research on the language has been the work of Lawrence E. Clark of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. More recent studies of Sayula Popoluca have been conducted by Dennis Holt (lexico-semantics) and Richard A. Rhodes (morphology and syntax), but few of their findings have been published.

'Popoluca' is the Castilian alteration of the Nahuatl word popoloca, meaning 'barbarians' or 'people speaking a foreign language'. In Mexico, the name 'Popoluca' is a traditional name for various Mixe-Zoquean languages, and the name 'Popoloca' is a traditional name for a totally unrelated language belonging to the Oto-Manguean languages.

Natively it is known as yamay ajw 'local language' or tʉcmay-ajw 'language of the home'.

Phonology

s is only found in Spanish loans.

Sayula vowels are short, long, and broken (i.e. glottalized, represented here as Vʔ).