Coconuco, also known as Coconucan, Guambiano, Misak, and Nam Trik, is a
dialect cluster
A dialect is a variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standardized varieties as well as vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardized varieties, such as those used in developing countries or iso ...
of
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country primarily located in South America with Insular region of Colombia, insular regions in North America. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the north, Venezuel ...
spoken by the
Guambiano indigenous people. Though the three varieties,
Guambiano, recently extinct
Totoró, and the long-extinct Coconuco are traditionally called languages, Adelaar & Muysken (2004) believe that they are best treated as a single language.
Totoró is now 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).
Phonology
The Guambiano inventory is as follows (Curnow & Liddicoat 1998:386).
References
Further reading
* Adelaar, Willem F. H.; & Muysken, Pieter C. 2004. ''The languages of the Andes''. Cambridge language surveys. Cambridge University Press.
* Branks, Judith; Sánchez, Juan Bautista. 1978. ''The drama of life: A study of life cycle customs among the Guambiano, Colombia, South America'' (pp xii, 107). Summer Institute of Linguistics Museum of Anthropology Publication (No. 4). Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics Museum of Anthropology.
* Vásquez de Ruiz, Beatriz. 2000. ''Guambiano: Algunos Aspectos sobre Morfología Nominal''. In González de Pérez, María Stella and Rodríguez de Montes, María Luisa (eds.), Lenguas indígenas de Colombia: una visión descriptiva, 155-168. Santafé de Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo.
* Curnow, Timothy Jowan, & Liddicoat, Anthony J. 1998. ''The Barbacoan Languages of Colombia and Ecuador'', Anthropological Linguistics, 40:3:384–408.
* Fabre, Alain. 2005. ''Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos: Guambiano
{{Languages of Colombia
Barbacoan languages
Languages of Colombia
Cauca Department