Chiquitano languages

Chiquitano
Chiquito
Geographic
distribution		Bolivia, Brazil (Santa Cruz (Bolivia); Mato Grosso (Brazil))
Ethnicityc. 100,000 Chiquitanos
Native speakers
2,400 (2021)
Linguistic classificationMacro-Jê?
  • Chiquitano
Subdivisions
Language codes
Glottologchiq1253

Chiquitano (or Tarapecosi) is a group of linguistic varieties, thought to belong to the Macro-Jê languages, spoken in the central region of Santa Cruz Department of eastern Bolivia and the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil.

Name

Some Chiquitano also prefer to call themselves Monkóka (plural form for 'people'; the singular form for 'person' is Monkóxɨ).

Classification

Chiquitano is sometimes considered to be a language isolate.

Kaufman (1994) suggests a relationship with the Bororoan languages within his Macro-Jê "cluster", a designation he gave to unsubstantiated language family proposals. Adelaar (2008) classifies Chiquitano as a Macro-Jê language, while Andrey Nikulin (2020) suggests that Chiquitano is rather a sister of Macro-Jê. More recently, Nikulin (2023) classified Chiquitano as a branch of Macro-Jê instead of as a sister branch of it.

Geographical distribution

In Brazil, Chiquitano is spoken in the municipalities of Cáceres, Porto Esperidião, Pontes e Lacerda, and Vila Bela da Santíssima Trindade in the state of Mato Grosso.

Varieties

Historical

Topographic map showing major towns and villages in the Chiquitania and the Jesuit missions. The Jesuit missions are in the highlands north-east of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in eastern Bolivia, close to the Brazil border.
Locations of the Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos with present international borders

Four "dialects" of Chiquitano were spoken at the time of the founding of the Jesuit missions: Tao (or Yúnkarirš), Piñoco, Manasí, and Penoquí. Of these dialects, Piñoco and Tao were claimed to be mutually intelligible and thus dialects of a single language. Nikulin (2019) proposes that Camba Spanish has a Piñoco substratum. Camba Spanish was originally spoken in Santa Cruz Department, Bolivia, but is now also spoken in Beni Department and Pando Department. The only documentation of Manasí comes from a manuscript by Lucas Caballero in 1706. It was quickly replaced by the Tao dialect. Penoquí was initially spoken in San José, but was soon replaced by the Piñoco dialect, and was so divergent that Father Felipe Suarez, who authored a Chiquitano grammar, had to translate the catechism and compile a dictionary of it. The document is held at the Archivo de la Sociedad Geográfica de Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Isabelle Combès (2012) has proposed the Penoqui "dialect" to be identical to Gorgotoqui, further proposing a possible relationship to Otuke, a Bororoan language. Otuke was also spoken in some of the missions. Nikulin (2019) considers this plausible.

Modern

The Churapa variety of Chiquitano was documented by Erland Nordenskiöld: 230–242  and the engineer Antonio Pauly.: 184–185  The Sansimoniano "dialect", particularly divergent from the others, known from a single wordlist published in 1935, has also been proposed to be a Chapacuran language, though this is erroneous according to the only wordlist of the dialect. The modern dialects of Chiquitano still spoken today, Bésɨro (Lomeriano), Migueleño, Ignaciano, and Santiagueño, the latter two tentatively proposed by Nikulin to form an Eastern subgroup, spoken in San Ignacio de Velasco, Santiago de Chiquitos, and Brazil, are all found in the area occupied by the Tao dialect; Nikulin (2019) thus considers these dialects, the proto-language of which he reconstructs as Proto-Chiquitano, to be descended from Tao.

Chiquitano

Vocabulary

For a vocabulary list of Chiquitano by Santana (2012), see the Portuguese Wiktionary.

Language contact

Chiquitano has borrowed extensively from an unidentified Tupí-Guaraní variety; one example is Chiquitano takones [takoˈnɛs] ("sugarcane"), borrowed from a form close to Paraguayan Guaraní takuare'ẽ ("sugarcane").: 8  There are also numerous Spanish borrowings.

Chiquitano (or an extinct variety close to it) has influenced the Camba variety of Spanish. This is evidenced by the numerous lexical borrowings of Chiquitano origin in local Spanish. Examples include bi ("genipa"), masi ("squirrel"), peni ("lizard"), peta ("turtle", "tortoise"), jachi ("chicha leftover"), jichi ("worm"; "jichi spirit"), among many others.

Further reading

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Nikulin, Andrey (May 26, 2021). "Chiquitano: a presentation". Universität Bonn.
  2. ↑ Kaufman, Terrence; Asher, Ronald E. (1994). "The native languages of South America". In Moseley, Christopher (ed.). Atlas of the world's languages. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-01925-5.
  3. ↑ Adelaar, Willem F. H. Relações externas do Macro-Jê: O caso do Chiquitano. In: Telles de A. P. Lima, Stella Virgínia; Aldir S. de Paula (eds.). Topicalizando Macro-Jê. Recife: Nectar, 2008. p. 9–27.
  4. 1 2 Nikulin, Andrey (2020). Proto-Macro-Jê: um estudo reconstrutivo (PDF) (PhD thesis). University of Brasília.
  5. ↑ Nikulin, Andrey (2023-12-01). "Lexical evidence for the Macro-Jê–Tupian hypothesis / Лексические свидетельства в пользу макро-же–тупийской гипотезы". Journal of Language Relationship. 21 (1–2): 1–56. doi:10.31826/jlr-2023-211-206. ISSN 2219-4029.
  6. ↑ Santana, Áurea Cavalcante. 2012. Línguas cruzadas, histórias que se mesclam: ações de documentação, valorização e fortalecimento da língua Chiquitano no Brasil. Doutorado, Universidade Federal de Goiás.
  7. ↑ FUNAI/DAF. Plano de Desenvolvimento de Povos Indígenas (PDPI) – Grupo Indígena Chiquitano, MT. Diretoria de Assuntos Fundiários: Brasília, 2002.
  8. ↑ Loukotka, Čestmír (1963). "Documents et vocabulaires inédits de langues et de dialectes sud-américains". Journal de la société des américanistes. 52 (1). Société des Américanistes: 7–60. doi:10.3406/jsa.1963.2001.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 Nikulin, Andrey (2020). "Contacto de lenguas en la Chiquitanía". Revista Brasileira de Línguas Indígenas. 2 (2): 5–30. doi:10.18468/rbli.2019v2n2.p05-30. S2CID 225674786. Archived from the original on 2023-10-20.
  10. ↑ Caballero, Lucas (1933) [1706]. Relación de las costumbres y religión de los indios manasicas. OCLC 1123471796.
  11. 1 2 Métraux, Alfred (1948). "Tribes of eastern Bolivia and the Madeira headwaters". In Steward, J.H. (ed.). Handbook of South American Indians (PDF). Vol. 3. pp. 381–454.
  12. ↑ Loukotka, Čestmír (1968). Wilbert, Johannes (ed.). Classification of South American Indian Languages (PDF) (4th ed.). Latin American Center, UCLA. p. 239. ISBN 9780879031077.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  13. ↑ Combès, Isabelle (2012-01-01). "Susnik y los gorgotoquis. Efervescencia étnica en la Chiquitania (Oriente boliviano)". INDIANA (in Spanish). INDIANA: 201–220 Páginas. doi:10.18441/IND.V29I0.201-220.
  14. ↑ Loukotka, Čestmír (1968). Classification of South American Indian Languages. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center. pp. 60.
  15. ↑ Nordenskiöld, Erland (1911). Indianer och hvita i nordöstra Bolivia. Stockholm: A. Bonnier.
  16. ↑ Pauly, Antonio. (1928). Ensayo de etnografía americana; viajes y exploraciones. Buenos Aires: Talleres s.a. casa Jacobo Peuser, ltda.
  17. ↑ Snethlage, Emil Heinrich (1935). "Nachrichten über die Pauserna-Guarayú, die Siriono am Rio Baures und die S. Simonianes in der Nähe der Serra S. Simon". Zeitschrift für Ethnologie. 67 (5/6): 278–293. ISSN 0044-2666.
  18. ↑ Fabre, Alain (2005). "Chapakura" (PDF). Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos. p. 1.
  19. ↑ Métraux, Alfred (1948). "The Chapacuran tribes". In Steward, J.H. (ed.). Handbook of South American Indians. Vol. 3. pp. 397–407.
  20. ↑ Ramirez, Henri (2013-04-18). "Etnônimos e topônimos no Madeira (séculos XVI-XX): um sem-número de equívocos". Revista Brasileira de Linguística Antropológica. 2 (2): 179–224. doi:10.26512/rbla.v2i2.16223. ISSN 2317-1375.
  21. ↑ CIUCCI, L.; MACOÑÓ TOMICHÁ, J. 2018. Diccionario básico del chiquitano del Municipio de San Ignacio de Velasco. Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Ind. Maderera “San Luis” S. R. L., Museo de Historia. U. A. R. G. M. 61 f.
  22. ↑ Santana, Áurea Cavalcante. 2012. Línguas cruzadas, histórias que se mesclam: ações de documentação, valorização e fortalecimento da língua Chiquitano no Brasil. Goiânia: Universidade Federal de Goiás.