Arhuaco language
language of Colombia
Arhuaco, commonly known as Ikʉ (Arhuaco: Ikʉ) (also known as Aruaco, Bintuk, Bíntukua, Bintucua, Ica, Ijca, Ijka, Ika, and Ike) is a Chibchan language, spoken in Colombia by the Arhuaco people.
There are 8,000 speakers, all in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region of Colombia, 90% of whom are monolingual. They have a very strong traditional culture and have vibrant use of their tongue. Literacy is 1 to 5% in their native language. Some speak Spanish, and 15 to 25% are literate in it.
Phonology
/ə/ is raised to and merged with /ɨ/ word finally.
Arhuaco has 17 consonant phonemes:
Syllable structure
With some exceptions, Arhuaco syllables may begin with up to two consonants (the second of which must be a glide /w j/) and may be closed by /ʔ n r w/ or /j/.
Prosody
Arhuaco stress normally falls on penultimate syllables, with secondary stresses occurring on every other preceding syllable, in the case of longer words (e.g. /ˌunkəˈsia/ 'protective bracelet'). There are some affixes and enclitics that are extrametrical and do not count as syllables for stress assignment.
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This entry incorporates text from “Arhuaco 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.