| Sumario: | The southern Tsotsil dialect from Venustiano Carranza appears as an atypical distant relative within Tsotsil (Mayan). According to popular opinion, it is not fully Tsotsil, but rather the result of mixing with Tseltal, a neighboring Mayan language. Indeed, it displays several Tseltal linguistic features, at least in appearance, and is locally called Tseltal. This study rules out mixed dialect status for Carranza Tsotsil, but establishes the existence of shared features with Southern Tseltal, revealing areal diffusion phenomena in that region. Through a review of its distinctive phonological, lexical, and grammatical features, a dialectal portrait of this divergent variant of Tsotsil is drawn, amidst retentions, innovations, and external influences. This entails refining our understanding of the diachronic evolution of the Tseltalan group, drawing on the corpus of colonial Tsotsil texts.
|
|---|
