Ayoreo is a

Zamucoan Zamucoan (also Samúkoan) is a small language family of Paraguay (northeast Chaco Department, Chaco) and Bolivia (Santa Cruz Department (Bolivia), Santa Cruz Department). The family has hardly been studied by linguists (as of Adelaar & Muysken 2 ...

language spoken in both

Paraguay Paraguay (; ), officially the Republic of Paraguay ( es, República del Paraguay, links=no; gn, Tavakuairetã Paraguái, links=si), is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the south and southwest, Brazil to th ...

and

Bolivia , image_flag = Bandera de Bolivia (Estado).svg , flag_alt = Horizontal tricolor (red, yellow, and green from top to bottom) with the coat of arms of Bolivia in the center , flag_alt2 = 7 × 7 square p ...

. It is also known as Morotoco, Moro, Ayoweo, Ayoré, and Pyeta Yovai. However, the name "Ayoreo" is more common in Bolivia, and "Morotoco" in Paraguay. It is spoken by

Ayoreo The Ayoreo (Ayoreode, Ayoréo, Ayoréode) are an indigenous people of the Gran Chaco. They live in an area surrounded by the Paraguay, Pilcomayo, Parapetí, and Grande Rivers, spanning both Bolivia and Paraguay. There are approximately 5,600 ...

, an indigenous ethnic group traditionally living on a combined

hunter-gatherer A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, ...

and farming lifestyle.

Classification

Ayoreo is classified as a

language, along with

Chamacoco The Chamacoco people (Ishír) are an indigenous people of Paraguay. “''Now our territory is that of the company''”, a ''tomáraho'' man said, “''we live there but it isn’t ours; it does not belong to us and has become an enemy place that ...

. Extinct Guarañoca may have been a dialect.

Geographic distribution

Ayoreo is spoken in both

and

, with 3,100 speakers total, 1700 of those in Paraguay and 1,400 in Bolivia. Within Paraguay, Ayoreo is spoken in the

Chaco Department The Paraguayan Chaco or Región Occidental (Western Region) is a semi-arid region in Paraguay, with a very low population density. The area is being rapidly deforested. Consisting of more than 60% of Paraguay's land area, but with less than 10% o ...

and the northern parts of the

Alto Paraguay Department Alto Paraguay (; ''Upper Paraguay'') is the least populous as well as a sparsely populated department of Paraguay. The capital is the town of Fuerte Olimpo. In 1992, the Chaco Department was merged with Alto Paraguay. Nature and national park ...

. In Bolivia, it is spoken in the

Gran Chaco Province Gran Chaco is a province in the eastern parts of the Bolivian department Tarija. The province voted to become an autonomous region on 6 December 2009. Location ''Gran Chaco'' province is one of six provinces in the Tarija Department. It is loc ...

, in the

Santa Cruz Department Santa Cruz () is the largest of the nine constituent departments of Bolivia, occupying about one-third (33.74%) of the country's territory. With an area of , it is slightly smaller than Japan or the US state of Montana. It is located in the e ...

Phonology

Bertinetto (2009) reports that Ayoreo has the 5 vowels /a, e, i, o, u/, which appear both as oral and nasal. /j/ can also be heard as ʒ

Grammar

The prototypical constituent order is subject-verb-object, as seen in the following examples (Bertinetto 2009:45-46): Ayoreo is a fusional language.Bertinetto, Pier Marco 2009. ''Ayoreo (Zamuco). A grammatical sketch''. Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. 8 n.s

/ref> Verbs agree with their subjects, but there is no tense-inflection.Ciucci, Luca 2007/08. ''Indagini sulla morfologia verbale nella lingua ayoreo''. Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, n.s. 7

/ref> Consider the following paradigm, which has prefixes marking person and suffixes marking number (Bertinetto 2009:29): When the verb root contains a nasal, there are nasalized variants of the agreement affixes: Ayoreo is a mood-prominent language. Nouns can be divided into possessable and non-possessable; possessor agreement is expressed through a prefixation.Ciucci, Luca 2010. ''La flessione possessiva dell'ayoreo''. Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, n.s. 9,2

/ref> The syntax of Ayoreo is characterized by the presence of Parataxis, para- hypotactical structures.Bertinetto, Pier Marco & Luca Ciucci 2012. ''Parataxis, Hypotaxis and Para-Hypotaxis in the Zamucoan Languages''. In: Linguistic Discovery 10.1: 89-111

/ref>

Notes

References

*Bertinetto, Pier Marco 2009
Ayoreo (Zamuco). A grammatical sketch
Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. 8 n.s. *Bertinetto, Pier Marco & Luca Ciucci 2012
Parataxis, Hypotaxis and Para-Hypotaxis in the Zamucoan Languages
In: Linguistic Discovery 10.1: 89-111. *Briggs, Janet R. 1972. Quiero contarles unos casos del Beni. Summer Institute of Linguistics in collaboration with the Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, Dirección Nacional de Antropología. Cochabamba *Briggs, Janet R. 1973. Ayoré narrative analysis. International Journal of American Linguistics 39. 155-63. *Ciucci, Luca. 2007/8a.
Indagini sulla morfologia verbale dell'ayoreo.
Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della Scuola Normale 7. *Ciucci, Luca 2010
La flessione possessiva dell'ayoreo
Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, n.s. 9,2 *Higham, Alice; Morarie, Maxine; and Greta Paul. 2000. Ayoré-English dictionary, 3 volumes. Sanford, FL: New Tribes Mission. * Branislava Sušnik, Sušnik, Branislava J. 1963. La lengua de los Ayoweos - Moros. Etnolingüística 8 (Boletín de la Sociedad Científica del Paraguay y del Museo Etnográfico). Asunción 8: 1- 148. * Branislava Sušnik, Sušnik, Branislava J. 1973. La lengua de los Ayoweo-Moros. Estructura gramatical y fraseario etnográfico. Asunción: Museo Etnográfico “Andrés Barbero”.

External links

* * The page provides colored linguistic maps (habitat, other language families).
Sorosoro Project

Lenguas de Bolivia
(online edition)
ELAR archive of Documentation and Description of Paraguayan Ayoreo, a Language of the Chaco

Ayoreo
(

Intercontinental Dictionary Series The Intercontinental Dictionary Series (commonly abbreviated as IDS) is a large database of topical vocabulary lists in various world languages. The general editor of the database is Bernard Comrie of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary An ...

) {{DEFAULTSORT:Ayoreo Language Languages of Bolivia Languages of Paraguay Indigenous languages of the South American Chaco Zamucoan languages Subject–verb–object languages Chaco linguistic area