Barbacoan languages
language family spoken in Colombia and Ecuador
Barbacoan (also Barbakóan, Barbacoano, Barbacoana) is a language family spoken in Colombia and Ecuador.
Genealogical relations
The Barbacoan languages may be related to the Páez language. Barbacoan is often connected with the Paezan languages (including Páez); however, Curnow (1998) shows how much of this proposal is based on misinterpretation of an old document of Douay (1888). (See: Paezan languages.)
Other more speculative larger groupings involving Barbacoan include the Macro-Paesan "cluster", the Macro-Chibchan stock, and the Chibchan-Paezan stock.
Language contact
Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Atakame, Cholon-Hibito, Kechua, Mochika, Paez, Tukano, Umbra, and Chibchan (especially between Guaymí and Southern Barbacoan branches) language families due to contact.
Languages
Pasto, Muellamués, Coconuco, Totoró and Caranqui are now extinct.
Pasto and Muellamués are usually classified as Barbacoan, but the current evidence is weak and deserves further attention. Muellamués may have been one of the last surviving dialects of Pasto (both extinct, replaced by Spanish) — Muellamués is known only by a short wordlist recorded in the 19th century. The Muellamués vocabulary is similar to modern Awa Pit. The Cañari–Puruhá languages are even more poorly attested, and while often placed in a Chimuan family, Adelaar (2004:397) thinks they may have been Barbacoan.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barbacoan languages” 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.