Arhuaco language
Chibchan language spoken in Colombia
Arhuaco, commonly known as Ikʉ (Arhuaco: Ikʉ) (also known as Aruaco, Bintuk, Bíntukua, Bintucua, Ica, Ijca, Ijka, Ika, and Ike) is a Chibchan language, spoken in Colombia by the Arhuaco people.
There are 8,000 speakers, all in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region of Colombia, 90% of whom are monolingual. They have a very strong traditional culture and have vibrant use of their tongue. Literacy is 1 to 5% in their native language. Some speak Spanish, and 15 to 25% are literate in it.
01Phonology
- /ə/ is raised to and merged with /ɨ/ word finally.
Arhuaco has 17 consonant phonemes:
| Labial | Alveolar | Alveolo- palatal |
Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Occlusive | voiceless | p ⟨p⟩ | t ⟨t⟩ | tʃ ⟨ch⟩ | k ⟨k⟩ | ʔ ⟨ꞌ⟩ |
| voiced | b ⟨b⟩ | d ⟨d⟩ | dʒ ⟨ɉ⟩ | ɡ ⟨g⟩ | ||
| Nasal | m ⟨m⟩ | n~ŋ ⟨n⟩ | ||||
| Fricative | voiceless | s ⟨s⟩ | h ⟨j⟩ | |||
| voiced | β ⟨w⟩ | z ⟨z⟩ | ʒ ⟨zh⟩ | |||
| Flap | ɾ ⟨r⟩ | |||||
Syllable structure
With some exceptions, Arhuaco syllables may begin with up to two consonants (the second of which must be a glide /w j/) and may be closed by /ʔ n r w/ or /j/.
Prosody
Arhuaco stress normally falls on penultimate syllables, with secondary stresses occurring on every other preceding syllable, in the case of longer words (e.g. /ˌunkəˈsia/ 'protective bracelet'). There are some affixes and enclitics that are extrametrical and do not count as syllables for stress assignment.
02Morphology
Personal pronouns
| person | singular | plural |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | nən | niβi |
| 2nd | ma | miβi |
| 3rd | a | ikənaʔ |
Frank (1985, 34) lists six personal pronouns for Arhuaco, with singular and plural numbers for first, second, and third persons. They "do not occur very frequently in text; they occur occasionally in subject position, very rarely in object position, and most frequently as the object of a preposition".
Unusually, person marking in Arhuaco verbs has evolved to have effectively become a way to mark epistemic modality or evidentiality.
03Syntax
The language uses a subject-object-verb (SOV) sentence structure.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Arhuaco language”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Arhuaco.png by Breogan2008, CC BY-SA 4.0
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