The Uru language, more specifically known as Iru-Itu, and Uchumataqu, is an extinct language formerly spoken by the
Uru people. In 2004, it had 2 remaining native speakers out of an ethnic group of 140 people in the
La Paz Department, Bolivia
The La Paz Department of Bolivia comprises with a 2012 census population of 2,706,359 inhabitants. It is situated at the western border of Bolivia, sharing Lake Titicaca with adjacent Peru. It contains the '' Cordillera Real'', which reaches ...
near
Lake Titicaca
Lake Titicaca (; es, Lago Titicaca ; qu, Titiqaqa Qucha) is a large freshwater lake in the Andes mountains on the border of Bolivia and Peru. It is often called the highest navigable lake in the world. By volume of water and by surface area ...
, the rest having shifted to
Aymara and
Spanish. The language is close enough to the
Chipaya language to sometimes be considered a dialect of that language.
Uru is also called Ochosuma (Uchuzuma), a historical name for the Uru ethnic group.
Olson (1964) mentions a variety of Uru,
Uru of Ch'imu, spoken on the
Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca. It is not clear if this was a dialect of Iru Itu or a separate Uru language.
Identifying Uchumataqu
Since one of the Urus' names for their language was "Pukina", Uchumataqu has previously been mistakenly identified with
Puquina
Puquina (or Pukina) is a small, putative language family, often portrayed as a language isolate, which consists of the extinct Puquina language and Kallawaya, although it is assumed that the latter is just a remnant of the former mixed with ...
.
While the personal and possessive pronouns of the unrelated Puquina bear limited similarities to those of Arawakan languages,
Uru differs drastically from Arawakan languages in its person-marking system and its morphology.
The pronoun system of Uchumataqu is naturally very similar instead to its close relative
Chipaya.
Uchumataqu has also borrowed grammatical and lexical morphemes from prolonged exposure to Aymara,
with which it is not related, however. Unlike Aymara, Uru is not
polysynthetic and has a phonemic five-vowel system /a e i o u/, while Aymara has a three-vowel system /a i u/.
One contrast between Uru and the related Chipaya is that Uru does not identify gender morphologically as Chipaya does.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Uru Language
Languages of Bolivia
Uru–Chipaya languages
Endangered indigenous languages of the Americas