Coconucan language

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Coconuco
Namrrik
Native to Colombia
Region Cauca Department
Ethnicity Guambiano (Misak)
Native speakers
21,000 (2008)[1]
Barbacoan
  • Coconuco
Language codes
ISO 639-3 Either:
gum – Guambiano
ttk – Totoró
Glottolog coco1262[2]

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).

Phonology

The Guambiano inventory is as follows (Curnow & Liddicoat 1998:386).

Vowels
front central back
close i u
mid e ə
back a
Consonants
  Bilabial Dental Retroflex Palatal Velar
Nasal m n ɲ  
Occlusive p t k
Affricate
Fricative s ʂ ʃ
Liquid r l ʎ
Semi-vowel w j

References

  1. Guambiano at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Totoró at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

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.
  • 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]