Coconuco, also known as Coconucan, Guambiano and Misak, 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.
Totoró 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).
Phonology
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 | ||
| Plosive | p | t | k | ||
| Affricate | ts | tʂ | tʃ | ||
| Fricative | s | ʂ | ʃ | ||
| Liquid | r, l | ʎ | |||
| Semivowel | w | j |
References
- ^ Guambiano at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
Totoró at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
Further reading
- 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.
- Vásquez de Ruiz, Beatriz. 2000. Guambiano: Algunos Aspectos sobre Morfología Nominal. In González de Pérez, María Stella and Rodríguez de Montes, María Luisa (eds.), Lenguas indígenas de Colombia: una visión descriptiva, 155-168. Santafé de Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo.
- 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]
This page was last edited on 19 June 2023, at 22:01