Pech (Paya)

The Pech language, an outlying member of the Chibchan family, is spoken by a few hundred people in northeastern Honduras. It is a tone-language of a relatively simple type, with just two distinctive pitch-levels. The phonemic inventory includes plain stops (among them just one voiced stop, b), fricatives, nasals, glides, and both oral and nasal vowels. Vowel allophony is largely motivated by syllable-type.

Pech is largely synthetic, involving rather complex, mostly suffixal morphology, especially in verb-forms, but also exhibiting prefixing, vocalic ablaut, reduplication, etc., as active morphological processes. Nouns and noun-phrases may be marked for grammatical function with case-suffixes. Pronominal possession is marked with a prefix on the possessed noun. Word-order is generally subject-object-verb. Both qualitative and quantitative adjectives follow the nouns that they modify; however, demonstrative adjectives precede nouns. Subordination is a very active process, and complex sentences are common; however, compound sentences are rare.