Ashéninka (Ashéninca, Ashéninga) is the name that some varieties included in the Ashéninka-

Asháninka The Asháninka or Asháninca are an indigenous people living in the rainforests of Peru and in the State of Acre, Brazil. Their ancestral lands are in the forests of Junín, Pasco, Huánuco and part of Ucayali in Peru. Population The Ash� ...

dialect complex have traditionally received. These varieties belong to the

Campan Campan (; oc, Campan) is a commune in the Hautes-Pyrénées department in the Occitanie region of south-western France. Geography Campan stands in a valley of the same name at the confluence of the rivers Adour and Adour de Payolle. It is s ...

branch of the

Arawak The Arawak are a group of indigenous peoples of northern South America and of the Caribbean. Specifically, the term "Arawak" has been applied at various times to the Lokono of South America and the Taíno, who historically lived in the Greater ...

family. '' Ethnologue'' distinguishes seven languages throughout the whole complex, while Pedrós proposes a division in three languages (Ashéninka, Asháninka and Northern Ashé-Ashá) based on the principle of

mutual intelligibility In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as a ...

. The varieties included in Ashéninka and Northern Ashé-Ashá have traditionally been called ''Ashéninka''.

Glottolog ''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute fo ...

reflects Pedrós’ proposal, although considering the languages proposed by him as groupings of the languages that the ''Ethnologue'' distinguishes. According to the indigenous peoples database of the

Peruvian Ministry of Education Peruvians ( es, peruanos) are the citizens of Peru. There were Andean and coastal ancient civilizations like Caral, which inhabited what is now Peruvian territory for several millennia before the Spanish conquest in the 16th century; Peruvian ...

, there are 15,281 people living in Ashéninka communities, of whom 8,774 (57%) claim to be able to speak the language. ''Ethnologue'' gives much higher figures for the different Ashéninka varieties. The classification of the different varieties was first established by David Payne in his Apurucayali Axininca grammar, but he referred to them as dialects and not as different languages. Ashéninka is a locally official language in Peru, as are all native Peruvian languages. It and its relatives are also known by the allegedly pejorative term ''Campa''.

Alphabet

Ashéninka was recognized as a separate language from Asháninka 2017, and the process to fix an alphabet finished in April 2019 with its approval by the Ministry of Education.

Consonants

Payne (1981) describes the following consonant inventory for Axininca aka Ashéninka Apurucayali: : Judith Payne has the same inventory for the Pichis variety, but without /ç/, and she adds the palatalized consonants /pʲ/, /kʲ/, /hʲ/, /mʲ/ and /βʲ/. Mihas shows a similar inventory for the Alto Perené variety with few differences. These are that Mihas does not include neither /tʰ/ nor /ç/; David Payne's contrast /t͡ʃ/-/t͡ʃʰ/ is considered /t͡ʃ/-/tʲ/ by Mihas, and she does not include any palatalized consonant because she considers them two-consonant clusters (Cj). Payne and Mihas show a four-vowel system (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/), while, in David Payne's Apurucayali, there are only three (/a/, /i/, /o/). These three varieties are included in Pedrós' Northern Ashé-Ashá group.

References

Languages of Peru Campa languages Languages of Brazil Arawakan languages {{Arawakan-lang-stub