Arhuaco, commonly known as 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.Arhuaco, by Arango and Sánchez, Ethnologue, 1998, access date
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.
Phonology + Vowels Front Central Back Close Mid Open
is raised to and merged with word finally.
Arhuaco has 17 consonant phonemes:
+ Consonants Labial Alveolar Alveolo-palatal Velar Glottal Occlusive Nasal ~ Fricative Flap
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.
Morphology
Personal pronouns +Arhuaco personal pronounspersonsingularplural1stnənniβi2ndmamiβi3rdaikənaʔ 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.
Syntax The language uses a subject–object–verb (SOV) sentence structure.
Notes
References
Frank, Paul. 1985. A grammar of Ika. PhD thesis. University of Pennsylvania. Frank, Paul. 2000. Ika syntax. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Landaburu, Jon. 2000 La lengua Ika, in Lenguas indígenas de Colombia: Una visión descriptiva. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo (Spanish).
External links Arhuaco (Ika) dictionary Ika language version of the Faculty of Humanities of the National University of Colombia