Awa Pit language
language
Awa Pit, otherwise known as Cuaiquer (Coaiquer, Cuayquer, Kwaiker, Kwayquer, etc.), is a Barbacoan language. Awa Pit is classified by UNESCO as a severely endangered language. The Awa Pit language has a subject–object–verb structure and has adopted the Latin script. Grammatically, Awa Pit uses a characteristic conjunct/disjunct system of verb suffixes for person-marking.
Speakers and characteristics
The Awa Pit language has around 21 thousand speakers, mostly residing on the Colombian Pacific slopes of the Andes, with about a thousand in an adjacent area of Ecuador. The Awa Pit language is spoken less and less each year. In a study done in 2008 there were about 12,000 Awa Pit speakers, but as of 2011 there are about 2,100 speakers left in the provinces of northern Ecuador. Most Awa women are monolingual to the Awa Pit language, while some men can speak both Spanish and Awa Pit and a very few of these Awa Pit speakers can both read and write the language. Literacy among Awa speakers is less than 1% in their native language and under 5% in the secondary Spanish language. The Awa people are mostly farmers.
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This entry incorporates text from “Awa Pit language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.