Tuyuca (also Dochkafuara, Tejuca, Tuyuka, Dojkapuara, Doxká-Poárá, Doka-Poara, or Tuiuca) is an Eastern Tucanoan language (similar to Tucano). Tuyuca is spoken by the Tuyuca, an indigenous ethnic group of some 500-1000 people, who inhabit the watershed of the Papuri River, the Inambú River, and the Tiquié River, in Vaupés Department, Colombia, and Amazonas State, Brazil.

Grammar

Tuyuca is a postpositional agglutinative subject–object–verb language with mandatory type II evidentiality. Five evidentiality paradigms are used: visual, nonvisual, apparent, second-hand, and assumed, but second-hand evidentiality exists only in the past tense, and apparent evidentiality does not occur in the first-person present tense. The language is estimated to have 50 to 140 noun classes.

Phonology

Tuyuca's consonants are, and its vowels are , with syllable nasalization and pitch accent occurring as well.

Vowels

Consonants

Contrasts

The following words show some of the consonant contrasts.

Bilabial contrasts

Alveolar contrasts

Velar and palatal contrasts

Variation

Nasal assimilation

Nasal harmony

Segments in a word are either all nasal or all oral. Note that voiceless segments are transparent. See further remarks regarding the oral/nasal nature of affixes in the Morphophonemics section.

Suprasegmental features

Tuyuca's two suprasegmental features are tone and nasalization.

Tone

There is a high tone (H) and a low tone (L) in Tuyuca. The phonological word has only one high tone, which may occur in any syllable of the word. The low tone has two variants: a mid-tone, which occurs in words with at least three syllables in free variation, and the low tone, which occurs in internal syllables that have that is contiguous to the high tone but not preceded by a low tone.

Nasalization

Nasalization is phonemic and operates at the root level.

Phonetic distribution and syllabic structure

A syllable is any unit that may take tone and has a vocalic nucleus, regardless of whether or not it has a consonant before it.

Restrictions

Morphophonemics

All affixes are in one of the two classes: When a nasal CV suffix occurs and C is a continuant or a vibrant /r/, regressive nasalization is undergone by the preceding vowel.