34

Chapter II

speakers from Mrida and Santa Elena on one hand and Sisbicchn on the
other. In the following discussion, I will first address the Mrida/Santa
Elena speakers and then the Sisbicchn speakers. For ease of exposition, I
will refer to the former group as the western dialect and to the latter as
the eastern dialect. These labels are for convenience only and should not
be taken as an indication that we can generalize the data presented here to
all speakers in the western or eastern part of the peninsula.8


8

In Frazier (2009), I show that additional speakers from Sisbicchn as well as

speakers from two other towns in the eastern part of Yucatan, Mxico (Xocn and
Yax Che) produce either the same pitch contours for LOW TONE and HIGH TONE
vowels or produce higher pitch for LOW TONE than for HIGH TONE vowels. The
full details of this study are beyond the scope of this paper, but they suggest that
eastern and western may be somewhat accurate for describing tonal dialects.