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San Juan Piñas Mixtec (endonym: Tò'ō Ndá'ví; henceforth SJPM) (ISO 639-3: vmc) is a previously undocumented Oto-Manguean language of the Mixtecan branch spoken in the municipality of Santiago Juxtlahuaca in Oaxaca, Mexico (shown in the map in Figure 1). According to a 2020 census conducted by the Mexican government (INEGI 2020), there are 717 inhabitants in the town of San Juan Piñas, almost all of whom speak SJPM as their native language. Additionally, speakers are found in diaspora communities in the western states of Baja California (Mexico), California, Oregon, Washington, and other places in Mexico and the United States. There are about half a million speakers of all Mixtec varieties in Mexico (INEGI 2020), and between 100,000 and 150,000 speakers of Mixtec in California (Kresge 2007). While elderly speakers in San Juan Piñas tend to be monolingual, younger speakers are bilingual in SJPM and Spanish. In diaspora communities in the United States, younger SJPM speakers shift to English and/or Spanish as their primary language(s) of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variation in voicing is common among sounds of the world's languages: sounds that are analyzed as voiceless can undergo voicing, and those analyzed as voiced can devoice. Among voiceless glottal sounds in particular, voicing is widespread: linguists often expect the voiceless glottal stop [ʔ] and fricative [h] to be fully voiced, especially between vowels. In this study, we use audio recordings from Illustrations of the International Phonetic Alphabet published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association to explore the extent to which glottal consonants and non-modal (breathy and creaky) vowels differ in terms of percentage voicing and voicing intensity in three phrasal positions. We find that voiceless [h] is only slightly less voiced than voiced [ɦ] in initial position. Between two vowels, both [h] and [ɦ] are as voiced as breathy vowels. Glottal stops and creaky vowels are both characterized by high percentages of voicing, but they differ in voicing intensity: in all phrasal positions, glottal stops generally have periods of strong and weak voicing, whereas creaky vowels are strongly voiced. In contrast, vowels described as 'rearticulated', 'checked', or 'glottalized' show similar drops in voicing intensity to glottal stops. We interpret these results through an articulatory lens: glottal consonants and non-modal vowels are both modulations in phonation resulting from laryngeal constriction and vocal fold spreading. We argue further that, because voicing during [ʔ] and [h] is largely predictable from respiratory and prosodic constraints, many cases of [ʔ] and [h] can be considered phonetically underspecified for voicing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]