Coconucan language

Coconuco
Guambiano
Spoken in	Colombia
Region	Cauca Department
Ethnicity	Guambiano (Misak)
Native speakers	23,500  (2001)
Language family	Barbacoan Coconuco
Language codes
ISO 639-3	variously: gum – Guambiano ttx – Totoró cca – Coconuco?^

Coconuco aka Guambiano is a dialect cluster of Colombia. 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				tʂ	tʃ
Fricative			s	ʂ	ʃ
Liquid			r l		ʎ
Semi-vowel		w			j

Notes

^ ISO code cca is for 'Cauca', which is an alternative name for Coconuco. Ethnologue includes it under the Choco languages, but Linguist List has updated it to Coconucan. It is therefore not clear if this is the proper code for this language; if not, it would appear that it has no code.

References

• 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]