Arhuaco, commonly known as Ikʉ, ( arh, Ikʉ, link=no) is an Indigenous American

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...

of the Chibchan language family, spoken in

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the southe ...

by the

Arhuaco people The Arhuaco are an indigenous people of Colombia. They are Chibchan-speaking people and descendants of the Tairona culture, concentrated in northern Colombia in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Name The Arhuaco are also known as the Aruaco, B ...

.Arhuaco
by Arango and Sánchez, Ethnologue, 1998, access date There are 8000 speakers, all in the

Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (English: ''Snow-Covered Mountain Range of Saint Martha'') is an isolated mountain range in northern Colombia, separate from the Andes range that runs through the north of the country. Reaching an elevation of ...

region of

Colombia Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Car ...

, 90% of whom are monolingual. Literacy is 1 to 5% in their native language. Some speak

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

, and 15 to 25% are literate in that auxiliary language. The users have a very strong traditional culture and have vibrant use of their tongue. It is also known as: ''Aruaco, Bintuk, Bíntukua, Bintucua, Ica, Ijca, Ijka, Ika, and Ike.'' The language uses a

subject–object–verb Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to: Philosophy *'' Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing **Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective con ...

(SOV) sentence structure.

Phonology

is raised to and merged with word finally. This language registers 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 one of the following consonants: /ʔ n r w 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.

References

Frank, Paul. 1985. A grammar of Ika. PhD thesis. University of Pennsylvania. Frank, Paul. 2000. Ika syntax. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Landaburu, Jon. 2000
La lengua Ika
in ''Lenguas indigenas de Colombia: Una visión descriptiva''. Bogota: Instituto Caro y Cuervo''.''

Notes

External links

Arhuaco (Ika) dictionary.

Ika language version of the Faculty of Humanities of the National University of Colombia.
{{authority control Languages of Colombia Chibchan languages Subject–object–verb languages