Enxet language

Enxet
Enxet
Southern Lengua
Énxet nempeywa
Pronunciation	[eːnɬet]
Native to	Paraguay
Region	Presidente Hayes
Ethnicity	5,840 Enxet Sur people (2002 census)
Native speakers	3,800 (2002 census)
Language family	Mascoian Enxet;
Language codes
ISO 639-3	enx
Glottolog	sout2989
ELP	Enxet Sur

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
Lateral	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]

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.