| Ayoreo | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in | Paraguay, Bolivia |
| Region | Chaco, Alto Paraguay departments (Paraguay), Santa Cruz department (Bolivia) |
| Ethnicity | Ayoreo people |
| Native speakers | 3,771 (date missing) |
| Language family |
Zamucoan
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | ayo |
Ayoreo is a Zamucoan language spoken in both Paraguay and Bolivia. It is also known as Morotoco , Moro, Ayoweo, Ayoré, and Pyeta Yovai. However, the name "Ayoreo" is more common in Bolivia, and "Morotoco" in Paraguay. It is spoken by Ayoreo, an indigenous ethnic group traditionally living on a combined hunter-gatherer and farming lifestyle.
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Ayoreo is classified as a Zamucoan language, along with Chamacoco.
Ayoreo is spoken in both Paraguay and Bolivia, with 3,771 speakers total, 3000 of those in Paraguay and 771 in Bolivia. Within Paraguay, Ayoreo is spoken in the Chaco Department and the northern parts of the Alto Paraguay Department. In Bolivia, it is spoken in the Gran Chaco Province, in the Santa Cruz Department.
Bertinetto (2009) reports that Ayoreo has the following vowels, which appear both as oral and nasal:
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | u | |
| Mid | e | o | |
| Low | a |
The prototypical constituent order is subject-verb-object, as seen in the following examples (Bertinetto 2009:45-46):
| Sérgio | ch-ingo | caratai | aroi | tome | Ramon. |
| Sérgio | 3-show | jaguar | skin | to | Ramon |
| ‘Sérgio showed the jaguar’s skin to Ramon’. | |||||
| Enga | ore | ch-ijnoque | Víctor | aja | señóra | Emília | i-guijnai. |
| COORD | 3P | 3-carry | Víctor | towards | señora | Emília | house |
| ‘And they carried Víctor to Señora Emília’s house’. | |||||||
Ayoreo is a fusional language.[1]
Verbs agree with their subjects, but there is no tense-inflection.[2] Consider the following paradigm, which has prefixes marking person and suffixes marking number (Bertinetto 2009:29):
| y-aca | I plant |
| b-aca | you plant |
| ch-aca | he, she, they plant |
| y-aca-go | we plant |
| uac-aca-y | you (pl) plant |
When the verb root contains a nasal, there are nasalized variants of the agreement affixes:
| ñ-ojne | I spread |
| m-ojne | you spread |
| ch-ojne | he, she, they spread |
| ñ-ojne-ngo | we spread |
| uac-ojne-ño | you (pl) spread |
Ayoreo is a mood-prominent language.[1] Nouns can be divided into possessable and non-possessable; possessor agreement is expressed through a prefixation.[3]
Bertinetto, Pier Marco 2009. Ayoreo (Zamuco). A grammatical sketch. Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. 8 n.s.
Briggs, Janet R. 1972. Quiero contarles unos casos del Beni. Summer Institute of Linguistics in collaboration with the Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, Dirección Nacional de Antropología. Cochabamba
Briggs, Janet R. 1973. Ayoré narrative analysis. International Journal of American Linguistics 39. 155-63.
Ciucci, Luca. 2007/8a. Indagini sulla morfologia verbal dell'ayoreo. Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della Scuola Normale 7.
Higham, Alice; Morarie, Maxine; and Greta Paul. 2000. Ayoré-English dictionary, 3 volumes. Sanford, FL: New Tribes Mission.
Sušnik, Branislava J. 1963. La lengua de los Ayoweos - Moros. Etnolingüística 8 (Boletín de la Sociedad Científica del Paraguay y del Museo Etnográfico). Asunción 8: 1- 148.
Sušnik, Branislava J. 1973. La lengua de los Ayoweo-Moros. Estructura gramatical y fraseario etnográfico. Asunción: Museo Etnográfico “Andrés Barbero”.