Coronals of San Juan Quiahije Chatino

This study documents the phonetics of the coronal consonants of the Otomanguean language San Juan Quiahije Chatino, which is an underdocumented language. Like other Chatino languages, San Juan Quiahije Chatino has two series of coronal consonants, which contrast across multiple manners of articulation. This study proposes that the two series are best described as alveolar and postalveolar, in contrast to earlier work defining them as apical-dental and laminal-alveolar. However, the exact place of articulation is affected by manner of articulation. The acoustics of each series are more unified: the second formant transition coming out of a postalveolar is consistently higher than coming out of an alveolar. These results add to our knowledge of coronal contrasts across languages and the acoustic differences between coronal places of articulation.