Coconucan language
| Coconuco | |
|---|---|
| Guambiano | |
| Native to | Colombia |
| Region | Cauca Department |
| Ethnicity | Guambiano (Misak) |
| Native speakers | 23,500 (2001)[1] |
| Language family |
Barbacoan
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | Variously: gum – Guambiano ttk – Totoró cca – Coconuco?^ |
Coconuco AKA Guambiano is a dialect cluster of Colombia spoken by the Guambiano indigenous people. Though the three varieties, Guambiano, moribund Totoró, and the extinct Coconuco, are traditionally called languages, Adelaar & Muysken (2004) believe that they are best treated as a single language.
Totoro may be extinct; it had 4 speakers in 1998 out of an ethnic population of 4,000. Guambiano, on the other hand, is vibrant and growing.
Coconucan was for a time mistakenly included in a spurious Paezan language family, due to a purported "Moguex" (Guambiano) vocabulary that turned out to be a mix of Páez and Guambiano (Curnow 1998).
Contents |
Phonology [edit]
The Guambiano inventory is as follows (Curnow & Liddicoat 1998:386).
| front | central | back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| close | i | u | |
| mid | e | ə | |
| back | a |
| Bilabial | Dental | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | |||
| Occlusive | p | t | k | |||
| Affricate | tʂ | tʃ | ||||
| Fricative | s | ʂ | ʃ | |||
| Liquid | r l | ʎ | ||||
| Semi-vowel | w | j | ||||
Notes [edit]
^ ISO code cca is for "Cauca", which is an alternative name for Coconuco. Ethnologue includes a "Cauca" under Coconucan along with other Choco languages. It is therefore not clear if this is the proper code for this language.
References [edit]
- ^ Guambiano at Ethnologue (16th ed., 2009)
Totoró at Ethnologue (16th ed., 2009)
Coconuco?^ at Ethnologue (16th ed., 2009)
Further reading [edit]
- Adelaar, Willem F. H.; & Muysken, Pieter C. 2004. The languages of the Andes. Cambridge language surveys. Cambridge University Press.
- Branks, Judith; Sánchez, Juan Bautista. 1978. The drama of life: A study of life cycle customs among the Guambiano, Colombia, South America (pp xii, 107). Summer Institute of Linguistics Museum of Anthropology Publication (No. 4). Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics Museum of Anthropology.
- Curnow, Timothy Jowan, & Liddicoat, Anthony J. 1998. The Barbacoan Languages of Colombia and Ecuador, Anthropological Linguistics, 40:3:384–408.
- Fabre, Alain. 2005. Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos: Guambiano[1]
