Arhuaco, commonly known as Ikʉ, ( arh, Ikʉ, link=no) is an Indigenous American language of the Chibchan language family, spoken in South America by the

Arhuaco people The Arhuaco are an indigenous people of Colombia. They are Chibchan-speaking people and descendants of the Tairona culture, concentrated in northern Colombia in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Name The Arhuaco are also known as the Aruaco, B ...

.Arhuaco
by Arango and Sánchez, Ethnologue, 1998, access date There are 8000 speakers, all in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region of

Colombia Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Car ...

, 90% of whom are monolingual. Literacy is 1 to 5% in their native language. Some speak Spanish, and 15 to 25% are literate in that auxiliary language. The users have a very strong traditional culture and have vibrant use of their tongue. It is also known as: ''Aruaco, Bintuk, Bíntukua, Bintucua, Ica, Ijca, Ijka, Ika, and Ike.'' The language uses a

subject–object–verb Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to: Philosophy *'' Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing **Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective con ...

(SOV) sentence structure.

Phonology

is raised to and merged with word finally. This language registers 17 consonant phonemes:

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 one of the following consonants: /ʔ n r w 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.

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 indigenas de Colombia: Una visión descriptiva''. Bogota: Instituto Caro y Cuervo''.''

Notes

External links

Arhuaco (Ika) dictionary.

Ika language version of the Faculty of Humanities of the National University of Colombia.
{{authority control Languages of Colombia Chibchan languages Subject–object–verb languages