Tilquiapan Zapotec (Zapoteco de San Miguel Tilquiápam) is an Oto-Manguean language of the Zapotecan branch, spoken in southern Oaxaca, Mexico.
Santa Inés Yatzechi Zapotec is close enough to be considered a dialect, and Ocotlán Zapotec is also close. They were measured at 87% and 59% intelligibility, respectively, in recorded text testing.
Each vowel can also be glottalized, a phenomenon manifested as either creaky voice throughout the vowel or, more commonly, as a sequence of a vowel and a glottal stop optionally followed by an echo of the vowel.
As with other Zapotec languages, the primary distinction between consonant pairs like and is not of voicing but between fortis and lenis (measured in length), respectively, with voicing being a phonetic correlate. There are two exceptions to this in Tilquiapan:
Neither is voiceless, but is pronounced a little longer and replaces in certain causative verbs in ways similar to other fortis/lenis consonantal changes (e.g. 'get loose' vs. 'let loose').
is not differentiated from in orthography. Word-final lenis is realized as .
and have fricative allophones and intervocalically.
before a consonant is .
varies between ~ ~ , and between ~ .
have retroflex allophones occurring before , while are typically occurring before .