| Athena Review Vol.1, no.3
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South American Languages | | | | |
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Humans
have been in South America for at least 12,500 years. As settlements
spread along rivers and coastlines, both intermixture and isolation of
South American populations occurred, with millenia of separation
eventually resulting from barriers of water, rainforests, and
mountains. Such ancient trends, overlain by more recent displacements
of colonialism, have caused South America to contain the most diverse
body of native languages on any continent. Many are now extinct, and
others are mere remnants of what contact period sources such as
Carvajal, reporting for the Orellana Amazon expedition in 1542, saw as
very large populations.
A total of 34 language families and over
a dozen isolated stocks with about 1000 individual languages have been
identified in South America. This represents a high level of diversity
on the level of language family compared to other continental areas.
All of Africa, Asia, and Europe combined have only 21 language
families, some of which have many more languages than any South
American language family. In Africa, for example, a single family
(Niger-Congo) contains 1436 languages, while another (Bantu) has over
1000 languages. In Europe and western Asia, meanwhile, the
Indo-European family includes 425 languages, ranging from Gaelic to
Hindi.
Based
on evidence of both physical and linguistic types among Native
Americans, scientists have postulated at least three major migrations
into the New World, beginning over 10,000 years ago. Archaeological
evidence from Monte Verde and other sites shows independently that
humans have been in South America for at least twelve and a half
thousand years. The relative complexity of South American languages is
thus partly due to gradual isolation of many groups over long periods
of time. Such diversity due to isolation is also observed in New Guinea
,which itself contains over 1000 languages in nine families within a
much smaller, but similarly dissected terrain.
Yet there have
also been serious classification problems in South America stemming
from lack of data. Given the absence of both aboriginal writing systems
and archaeological findings in many tropical forest regions,
reconstructing ancestral language relations from comparisons of present
languages provides both a difficult challenge, and a unique opportunity
to unravel the prehistory of South America.
Many useful written
sources exist from the colonial period, and highly productive work on
recording extant native languages continues by ethnographers and
linguists, many from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), and
university linguistic departments. The SIL Ethnologue (Grimes and
Grimes 1996) contains up-to-date listings of both families and
individual languages. Other detailed compilations will be found in
Amazonian Languages (ed. R.M.W. Dixon; 1998). Earlier summaries are in
Klein and Stark's 1985 volume, South American Indian Languages, based
on a 1977-8 conference; and (as a starting point for later research) J.
Alden Mason's detailed discussion in Vol. 6 of the Handbook of South
American Indians (BAE 1950), a major ethnographic source.
History of South American Linguistics:
After initial contact in Trinidad and Venezuela by Columbus' third
voyage in 1498 and by Ojeda in 1499, documentation of South American
languages began with simple vocabularies and place names collected from
native informants, using (somewhat inconsistently) the phonological
notation of the recorder's own language. During the first decades of
the 16th century, such basic word lists were recorded by Spanish,
Portuguese, French, Dutch, British, and German explorers including
Pigafetta (Magellan's chronicler), Sebastian Cabot, Carvajal
(Orellana's chronicler) and Staden, as well as by early historians such
as Peter Martyr and Oviedo.
Early in the 16th century, Jesuit
and Dominican priests began keeping more systematic linguistic records.
They learned the indigenous languages in order to convert natives to
Catholicism and also, in some cases, wrote analytic grammars and
lexicons. In the Andean region of the Inca empire, for example, Jesuit
priests were required to learn the three native languages of Quechua,
Aymara, and Puquina. Their emphasis on Quechua, the language of the
Inca nobility, resulted in the spread of this language, which today has
an estimated 7 million speakers, while Puquina became extinct (Klein
and Stark 1985). In Amazonia, meanwhile, missionary work in the 17th
and 18th centuries by Samuel Fritz and others resulted in relatively
detailed knowledge of the Tupi languages of the Omagua and neighboring
tribes. Portuguese and Dutch trading stations on the Brazil and Guiana
coasts were also centers for learning languages of the Tupi, Arawak,
Carib, and other coastal cultures.
During the 19th and 20th
centuries, ethnographers and linguists worked in difficult field
conditions to record the surviving native languages of South America.
Linguists have had to accept both severe problems of missing data and
the need to build up modest, small-scale correlations. The large-scale
comparisons often used in historical linguistics often may not be
compatible with the finer-grained empirical focus needed for studying
individual languages.
The comparative method:
First clearly formulated in the 19th century in the study of
Indo-European languages, comparative linguistics begins by analyzing a
language into its basic components of sound or phonetics; vocabulary or
lexicon; meaning or semantics; and grammar or syntax. To establish a
valid family relationship between two or more languages, a series of
close phonological, lexical, and grammatical links must be demonstrated
beyond the possibility of mere accident or borrowing (Gudschinsky 1964).
Such
historic links are established when the development of one or more
languages can be tied to a parent tongue by means of tracing
non-borrowed innovations backward from the daughter to the parent.
Swadesh (1954) devised a 200-word core vocabulary of numbers, body
parts, pronouns, and geographical features, and found that an average
of 80.5% of these basic words remained in use for at least 1000 years.
Many linguistic studies, however, do not accept lexico-statistics as
valid, because the assumption of a constant rate of change often seems
contradicted by empirical  data.
Fig.1: Map of languages in the Amazon and Orinoco Basins (Athena Review, after Mason 1950 and SIL Ethnologue 1996).
Following the 1996 SIL Ethnologue, major South American language families are given with related ethnographic data:
Arawakan:
The most widely distributed of Amazonian language families, Arawakan
includes 74 languages, divided into several subgroups including Aruan,
Guahiban, Harakmbet, and Maipuran. These branches are estimated to have
split from their proto-Arawakan parent between 4500 and 2500 years ago.
Many Arawakan languages are now extinct, but a few survive in the
former heartland region of the Amazon-Orinoco. Maipuran, once centered
in the western Amazon region, by about 3000 years ago spread throughout
the Caribbean Antilles. Arawakan speakers who migrated from Venezuela
to the Greater Antilles are now grouped into Taino, Sub-Taino, and
Lucayan dialects, first encountered by Columbus.
Tupi-Guaraní:
A total of 70 Tupi-Guaraní languages are grouped into nine branches
centered in southern Amazonia. In contact times numerous Tupi speakers
lived along the Brazilian coast, río Paraná, and south bank of the
Amazon, often serving as traders, and aggressively expanding into
neighboring territories. Speakers of Tupi languages including Omagua,
Cocama, Nhengatu, Potiguara, Tupinambá, and Tupinikin allied themselves
as opportunity dictated with either the French, Spanish, or Portuguese.
As a result, the Tupi language became the lingua franca of traders,
missionaries, and soldiers such as Orellana and Fritz (Omagua), and
Staden (Tupinikin and Tupinambá). Guaraní was spoken in coastal regions
south of Tupi territory, and inland as far as modern Paraguay and
Bolivia.
Macro-Gê:
Speakers of the 32 known Macro-Gê languages are mostly in the Brazilian
highlands, where their tribes were probably pushed by the northern and
eastern migrations of Tupi-Guaraní groups from the Paraguay-Paraná and
Amazon river areas shortly before contact. The largest subgroup,
Gê-Kaingang, includes Shavante, Sherente, Acroa, Apinaye, Kayapo, Suya,
Timbira, and three Kaingang dialects. One Shavante group, the
Akwe-Shavante, live along the río Araguaia near the río Xingu,
subsisting on maize, roots, palmito shoots, palm nuts, and turtle eggs,
deer, peccary, and tapir (Mayberry-Lewis 1958). Further up the río
Araguaia in central Mato Grosso are the Bororo, who subsist by hunting,
gathering, and fishing, and live in both longhouses and conical huts.
Carib:
Divided into two branches, with 21 Northern and 8 Southern Carib
languages, most speakers are in the Guianas, Venezuela, and northern
Brazil, from where Proto-Carib migrations began ca. 4500 BP. One of the
largest Carib groups are the Macushi in Guiana. Initial accounts of the
Carib from Columbus' first two voyages of 1492-4 described the
Arawakan-speaking Taino of the Greater Antilles as living in fear of
Caribs, named Canibales and Caniba. Peter Martyr referred to the Lesser
Antilles as "the archipelago of the cannibals, or the Caribs," and they
are shown on the la Cosa map as "Islas de Canibales". Both Columbus'
third voyage (1498) and Ojeda's voyages (1499-1509) met Carib groups in
northern Venezuela and Colombia. Carib villages on lower Amazon islands
were also passed during Orellana's 1542 expedition .
Yanomam:
Living on the upper Orinoco drainage along the border of Venezuela and
Brazil, the Yanomamö number about 15,000 (Chagnon 1968). They are
tropical forest hunters and agriculturalists who raise bananas, tubers,
and tobacco, and have gained a reputation for fierce revenge killings
and raids. Related to Yuwana in central Venezuela, Yanomam languages
include Yanomamö, Yanomami, Guaica, Guaharibo, and Guajaribo.
Tucanoan:
The 26 Tucanoan languages are centered in western (upper) Amazonia. Two
main concentrations of Tucanoan languages (East and West) are separated
by pockets of Witotoan and Carib. The Cubeo, a Tucanoan group of about
6000 in the Vaupés region of southern Colombia along the Brazilian
border, are riverine fishers and manioc cultivators (Goldman 1963).
Panoan:
Among 29 Panoan languages in the río Ucayali basin are Conibo, Shipibo,
and Setebo, and the Cashibo, Capanawa, and Juruá-Purús branches. The
Conibo and Shipibo are described by Marcoy (1869), and Herndon (1854),
and Lathrap (1970). The Sharanahua, numbering about 1000 along
the río Purus in Peru and Brazil subsist on hunting, fishing with
poison, and cultivation of manioc, maize, plantains and peanuts
(Siskind 1973). Hallucinogens called shori are made from Ayahusca vine
for vision quests.
Jívaroan:
The Jívaro live in the forested foothills of the Andes in Peru and
Ecuador along three tributaries of the río Santiago, and subsist on
slash and burn farming of manioc and maize. Other utilized plants
include cotton, fish poison, and hallucinogenic drugs for vision quests
and headhunting raids. Two branches include the Candosi and the Shuar
("people") with four languages (Achuar-Shiwar, Aguaruna, Huambisa, and
Shurar) spoken by up to 30,000 people. Polygyny among the Jívaro stems
from a high female-to-male ratio, linked to attrition of males through
revenge killings (Harner 1972).
Quechuan:
Including 47 languages, Quechuan has been widely spoken in the Andean
region for more than 500 years. Quechuan may have originated in
northern Peru, diverging into several branches by about AD 800, with
one group leading to the Inca civilization. Due to Inca conquest and
Spanish colonization, by the late 16th century Quechuan became dominant
in the Andean area. By 1560, the Jesuit priest Domingo de Santo Tomas
completed a Spanish grammar of Quechuan and a bilingual dictionary.
Today, Quechuan is the only native language extant in the Ecuadorian
highlands, with at least seven million speakers in numerous dialects.
Aymaran:
With about 1.5 million speakers, Aymaran (in the Jaqi family) is spoken
in the highlands of Peru and Bolivia, in northern Chile, and Argentina.
Other Jaqi languages include Jaqaru and the extinct Kawki. Aymaran was
also well documented by missionaries, starting in 1584 with a catechism
written by an anonymous Aymara convert to Catholicism. By 1603 Ludovico
Bertonio, a Jesuit missionary, wrote three grammars, a dictionary, and
several religious works in Aymara. Ethnographic and linguistic research
continues in the region.
Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego:
Tehuelche, once the principal language in Patagonia, belongs to the
Chon family, with the earliest word list from Magellan's chronicler
Pigafetta. The Ona of Tierra del Fuego also spoke a Chon language,
while the neighboring Yahgan and Alacaluf speak ungrouped isolates.
Various earlier sources including Captain Fitz Roy and Charles Darwin
of the Beagle provided data on now-extinct languages (Cooper 1917).
Many
scholars have viewed South America as a region of both extreme
linguistic diversity, and relative ignorance concerning the native
languages. Without native written sources, piecing together the puzzle
of the historic relations of these languages seems virtually
impossible. Yet combined efforts of ethnography, historical study, and
linguistic reconstruction constitute a type of New World exploration
which should continue to produce major discoveries.
[The editors
of Athena Review are grateful to Desmond Derbyshire, Spike Gildea,
Barbara Grimes, Joseph Grimes, and David Payne for their suggestions
for this article]
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