- generally considered part of the Northern group of Totonacan
- spoken in four villages in the Necaxa River valley in the Sierra Norte of Puebla—Patla, Chicontla, Cacahuatlán, and San Pedro Tlaolantongo
- around 3,400 speakers, most in their 40s or older
- still spoken by school-aged children in Patla and Cacahuatlán
- probably the L1 of no more than half a dozen infants
Typological features:
- flexible word order, unmarked VOS (?)
- agglutinative and highly polysynthetic
- four aspects, three tenses, four moods
- agreement with subject and 2 objects
- two causatives, four applicatives
- no prepositions, bodypart terms used as locatives
- use of bodypart prefixes with verbs and adjectives
- ejective fricatives, no ejective stops
- vowels distinguish length and laryngealization
More information:
Upper Necaxa Totonac Project
Language shift in the Necaxa Valley
Upper Necaxa in Wikipedia