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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. 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.

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. 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. The Enxet language was first documented in the late nineteenth century by explorers from Spain.

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.

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

/cʲ/ can also be heard as a regular palatal stop or a palatalized velar stop in free variation.

Further reading

• Campbell, Lyle (2013). "Language Contact and Linguistic Change in the Chaco". Revista Brasileira de Linguística Antropológica. 5 (2): 259–292. doi:10.26512/rbla.v5i2.16268.
• Messineo, Cristina; Cúneo, Paola (2011). "Ethnobiological Classification in Two Indigenous Languages of the Gran Chaco Region: Toba (Guaycuruan) and Maká (Mataco-Mataguayan)". Anthropological Linguistics. 53 (2): 132–169. doi:10.1353/anl.2011.0010. S2CID 143781977.
• Hammarström, H. (2014). Basic vocabulary comparison in South American languages. The Native Languages of South America: Origins, Development, Typology, 56.
• Kidd, Stephen W. (1995). "Land, Politics and Benevolent Shamanism: The Enxet Indians in a Democratic Paraguay". Journal of Latin American Studies. 27 (1): 43–75. doi:10.1017/S0022216X00010166.
• Klein, Harriet Manelis; Stark, Louisa R. (1977). "Indian Languages of the Paraguayan Chaco". Anthropological Linguistics. 19 (8): 378–401. JSTOR 30027605.
• Langer, Erick D. (2001). "Peoples of the Gran Chaco". American Ethnologist. 28 (1): 249–251. doi:10.1525/ae.2001.28.1.249.

References

1. ISO change request
2. Enxet at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
3. Brenzinger, M. (2008). Language Diversity Endangered (1st ed.). Walter De Gruyter.
4. ^ Campbell, Lyle; Grondona, Verónica, eds. (2012). The Indigenous Languages of South America: A Comprehensive Guide. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Elliott, John A. (2021). A Grammar of Enxet Sur. University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.

External links

• ELAR collection: The Enxet documentation project deposited by John Elliott
• Lengua (Intercontinental Dictionary Series)

• Languages of Paraguay
• Mascoian languages
• Chaco linguistic area