Phonological description of Huasteca Nahuatl from Chicontepec, Veracruz

In this thesis, some salient phonological features of contemporary Huasteca Nahuatl from Chicontepec, Veracruz are highlighted. First, a preliminary analysis of the vowel and consonant inventory is presented. Second, some of the phonological patterns observed are discussed with support from acoustic analysis (for example, lenition of /k/, assimilation of /h/, and deletion of codas). In this discussion, the role that stress, syllable structure, and utterance-level prosody play in allophonic variation is explored, such as glottal stop epenthesis. These phenomena are discussed in light of the interaction between morphology and phonology. Also, new light is shed on word-final Nahuatl nasal allophony: underlying word final nasal sounds are realized as an aspiration in unstressed syllables and as a nasalized vowel in stressed syllables and monosyllabic words.