Upper Necaxa Totonac
Upper Necaxa Totonac (a.k.a. Patla-Chicontla Totonac) is generally considered part of the Northern group of Totonacan. It is spoken in four villages in the Necaxa River valley in the Sierra Norte of Puebla—Patla, Chicontla, Cacahuatlán, and San Pedro Tlaolantongo. In all there are around 3,400 speakers, most in their 40s or older. It is still spoken by school-aged children in Patla and Cacahuatlán, but probably the first language of no more than half a dozen infants.
Typological features:
- free word order, unmarked VOS (?)
- agglutinative and highly polysynthetic
- four aspects, three tenses, four moods
- agreement with subject and 2 objects
- two causatives, four applicatives
- no prepositions, bodypart terms used as locatives
- use of bodypart prefixes with verbs and adjectives
- ejective fricatives, no ejective stops
- vowels distinguish length and laryngealization