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Fig. 4. Young Trique women dancing in traditional huipiles (dresses), Oaxaca, Mexico. recent years, children have begun to use Spanish more among their peers (IGABE, 2011). While there are currently many Trique speakers, the language is danger of being replaced entirely by Spanish (See Fig. 4). The large inventory of tonal melodies is certainly a fea- ture of the Itunyoso Trique language that is seldom found elsewhere, but it is not the only such feature. Itunyoso Trique also has a contrast between long and short consonants found only in the initial position of words. While many languages in the world have consonant length contrasts, such as Japanese katta ‘bought’ and kata ‘shoulder’, this distinction is often restricted to the middle of the word (Muller, 2001). Itunyoso Trique is one of only two languages in the world known to restrict this contrast between long and short con- sonants to the beginning of a word. The other language is Nhaheun (ISO 639 nev), an Austroasiatic language spoken in Laos (Muller, 2001). One of the intriguing things about this rare contrast in Trique is how voicing functions in the short and long stop consonants. Stops are sounds with a closure in the mouth fol- lowed by a sudden release. Many languages distinguish between voiceless stops, like for instance, French “p”, “t”, and “k,” and voiced stops, like French “b”, “d”, and “g.” Voiced stops are produced when the vocal folds are vibrating, voice- less stops when the vocal folds are not vibrating. Yet, in Itunyoso Trique, the long consonants are often preceded by a short puff of air, called preaspiration. The short consonants are rarely produced this way, but vary in their production. They may be voiceless, like a “p”, or voiced, like a “b.” This variability has led researchers to misclassify length contrasts For this, we studied a language close at hand, English. Our preliminary results showed that, indeed, English also allows these three different groove depths to persist through the vowel (Whalen et al., 2011). Although no language is com- pletely neutral as a comparison to harmony processes, it is useful to compare such patterns to languages for which we have greater phonetic knowledge, like English. So it is plausi- ble that the foundations for a three-way harmony system could be seen in a language that has not yet shown any use of such a process. We hope to extend this work by measuring images from additional Tahltan speakers and by making a more thorough comparison with English data. Nevertheless, these results are already helping to settle an important issue in linguistic theory: Consonant harmony can be seen as a local process after all. Electroglottographic study of devoicing in Itunyoso Trique Itunyoso Trique (ISO 639 trq) is an Oto-Manguean lan- guage spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico by approximately 1,400 people (Lewis, 2009). It is one of three Trique dialects, each of which has a unique sound structure and grammar. Like all Oto-Manguean languages, Itunyoso Trique is tonal. This means that the level and direction of pitch in the voice may distinguish the meaning of words. The Itunyoso dialect has nine different tonal melodies that words can carry (DiCanio, 2010). As a comparison, Mandarin Chinese is also tonal, but with only four possible tonal melodies. Most Trique speakers are bilingual, speaking Spanish as a second language. In 38 Acoustics Today, October 2011