| Coconuco | |
|---|---|
| Guambiano | |
| Spoken in | Colombia |
| Region | Cauca Department |
| Ethnicity | Guambiano (Misak) |
| Native speakers | 23,500 (2001) |
| Language family |
Barbacoan
|
| 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).
The Guambiano inventory is as follows (Curnow & Liddicoat 1998:386).
| front | central | back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| close | i | u | |
| mid | e | ə | |
| back | a |
| 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 | ||||
^ 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.