Ayoreo is a Zamucoan language spoken in both

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 ...

and

Bolivia Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia, is a landlocked country located in central South America. The country features diverse geography, including vast Amazonian plains, tropical lowlands, mountains, the Gran Chaco Province, w ...

. It is also known as Morotoco, Moro, Ayoweo, Ayoré, and Pyeta Yovai. However, the name "Ayoreo" is more common in Bolivia, and "Morotoco" in Paraguay. It is spoken by the Ayoreo people, an indigenous ethnic group traditionally living on a combined

hunter-gatherer A hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living in a community, or according to an ancestrally derived Lifestyle, lifestyle, in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local naturally occurring sources, esp ...

and farming lifestyle.

Classification

Ayoreo is classified as a Zamucoan language, along with

Chamacoco The Chamacoco people (Ishír) are an indigenous people of Paraguay. “''Now our territory is that of the company''”, a ''tomáraho'' man said, “''we live there but it isn’t ours; it does not belong to us and has become an enemy place that ...

. Extinct Guarañoca may have been a dialect.

Geographic distribution

Ayoreo is spoken in both

and

, with 3,100 speakers total, 1,700 of whom live in Paraguay and 1,400 in Bolivia. Within Paraguay, Ayoreo is spoken in the

Chaco Department The Paraguayan Chaco or Región Occidental (Western Region) is a semi-arid region in Paraguay, with a very low population density. It is the Paraguayan part of the Gran Chaco. The area is being rapidly deforested, with the highest deforestation ...

and the northern parts of the Alto Paraguay Department. In Bolivia, it is spoken in the Cordillera Province, in the

Santa Cruz Department Santa Cruz () is the largest of the nine constituent departments of Bolivia, occupying about one-third (33.74%) of the country's territory. With an area of , it is slightly smaller than Japan or the US state of Montana. It is located in the ...

Phonology

Bertinetto (2009) reports that Ayoreo has the 5 vowels , which appear both as oral and nasal. can also be heard as .

Grammar

The prototypical constituent order is subject-verb-object, as seen in the following examples: Ayoreo is a fusional language. Verbs agree with their subjects, but there is no tense-inflection. Consider the following paradigm, which has prefixes marking person and suffixes marking number: When the verb root contains a nasal, there are nasalized variants of the agreement affixes: Ayoreo is a mood-prominent language. Nouns can be divided into possessable and non-possessable; possessor agreement is expressed through a prefixation. The syntax of Ayoreo is characterized by the presence of para- hypotactical structures.

Notes

References

* * * * * * * * *

External links

* * The page provides colored linguistic maps (habitat, other language families).
Sorosoro Project

Lenguas de Bolivia
(online edition)
ELAR archive of Documentation and Description of Paraguayan Ayoreo, a Language of the Chaco

Ayoreo
(

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 ...

) {{DEFAULTSORT:Ayoreo Language Languages of Bolivia Languages of Paraguay Indigenous languages of the South American Chaco Zamucoan languages Subject–verb–object languages Chaco linguistic area