Enxet, also known as Enxet Sur or Southern Lengua, is a language spoken by the Indigenous southern
Enxet
The Enxet are an indigenous people of about 17,000 living in the Gran Chaco region of western Paraguay. Originally hunter-gatherers, many are now forced to supplement their livelihood as laborers on the cattle ranches that have encroached upon ...
people of
Presidente Hayes Department
Presidente Hayes () is a department in Paraguay. The capital is the city of Villa Hayes. The department was named after U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, who awarded the territory to Paraguay while arbitrating a boundary dispute between Par ...
,
Paraguay
Paraguay, officially the Republic of Paraguay, is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the Argentina–Paraguay border, south and southwest, Brazil to the Brazil–Paraguay border, east and northeast, and Boli ...
. It is one of twenty languages spoken by the wider
Gran Chaco
The Gran Chaco or simply Chaco is a sparsely populated, hot and semiarid lowland tropical dry broadleaf forest natural region of the RÃo de la Plata basin, divided among eastern Bolivia, western Paraguay, northern Argentina, and a portion o ...
Amerindians
In the Americas, Indigenous peoples comprise the two continents' pre-Columbian inhabitants, as well as the ethnic groups that identify with them in the 15th century, as well as the ethnic groups that identify with the pre-Columbian population of ...
of
South America
South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...
. Once considered a dialect of a broader language, known as
Vowak or
Powok,
Enxet
The Enxet are an indigenous people of about 17,000 living in the Gran Chaco region of western Paraguay. Originally hunter-gatherers, many are now forced to supplement their livelihood as laborers on the cattle ranches that have encroached upon ...
(Southern Lengua) and
Enlhet (Northern Lengua) diverged as extensive differences between the two were realized.
Classification
Enxet belongs to the Enlhet-Enenlhet (aka Mascoian) language family, a small family of languages spoken in the Paraguayan region of the South American Gran Chaco.
Enxet is most closely related to its sister language Enlhet, based on some preliminary analysis, but a substantial historical analysis of the Enlhet-Enenlhet family has not yet been published.
History
Enxet and Enlhet were once considered dialects of a single language known as ''Lengua''.
The Enxet language was first documented in the late nineteenth century by explorers from
Spain
Spain, or the Kingdom of Spain, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe with territories in North Africa. Featuring the Punta de Tarifa, southernmost point of continental Europe, it is the largest country in Southern Eur ...
.
Language contents and structure
Enxet contains only three phonemic vowel qualities /e,a,o/, each requiring a certain length such to maximize distinction. Bilingual speakers of Spanish and Enxet purportedly utilize shorter spacing between vowels when speaking Enxet compared to Spanish.
Phonology
Vowels
Consonants
/cʲ/ can also be heard as a regular palatal stop
or a palatalized velar stop
ʲin free variation.
Further reading
*
*
* Hammarström, H. (2014)
Basic vocabulary comparison in South American languages ''The Native Languages of South America: Origins, Development, Typology'', 56.
*
*
*
References
External links
* ELAR collection
The Enxet documentation projectdeposited by John Elliott
Lengua(
Intercontinental Dictionary Series
The Intercontinental Dictionary Series (commonly abbreviated as IDS) is a large database of topical vocabulary lists in various world languages. The general editor of the database is Bernard Comrie of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary An ...
)
{{Mataco-Guaicuru languages
Languages of Paraguay
Mascoian languages
Articles citing ISO change requests
Chaco linguistic area