The Cacua language, also known as Kakua or Kakwa, is an indigenous language spoken by a few hundred people in

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 ...

and

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

. There are many monolinguals, especially children. Apart from being close to or a dialect of

Nukak The Nukak people (also Nukak- Makú) live between the Guaviare and Inírida rivers, in the depths of the tropical humid forest, on the fringe of the Amazon basin, in Guaviare Department, Republic of Colombia. They are nomadic hunter-gatherers ...

, its classification is uncertain.

Overview

The language is spoken by indigenous American Cacua akuapeople that live in Colombian and Brazilian interfluvial tropical forests higher than in elevation. The people have traditional livelihoods such as nomadic

hunting-gathering 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

swidden agriculture Slash-and-burn agriculture is a farming method that involves the cutting and burning of plants in a forest or woodland to create a Field (agriculture), field called a swidden. The method begins by cutting down the trees and woody plants in an ar ...

. There are some non-native speakers of Cacua that are predominantly

missionary A missionary is a member of a Religious denomination, religious group which is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development.Tho ...

workers. Their presence has resulted in the translation of religious Christian texts, notably the Christian Bible.

Distribution

The speakers are located in Wacara (In Cacua: ''Wacará'') which is from Mitu (In Cacua and Spanish: ''Mitú'') in the lower Vaupes Region. (In Spanish: ''Departamento del Vaupés''). A second Kakua settlement is "Nuevo Pueblo" (New Town), which is an inland forest village between the Vaupés and the Papurí rivers.

Classification

There are two dialects: Vaupés Cacua and Macú-Paraná Cacua. Cacua is mutually intelligible with

, and is considered a dialect of the latter by Martins (1999). See that article for further classification. Other names for this language include: ''Bára, Cakua, Kákwa, Macu de Cubeo, Macu de Desano, Macu de Guanano, Macú-Paraná, Wacara''.

Phonology

Kakwa has 6 vowels: /a, e, i, ɨ, o, u/. The /o/ sound occurs only marginally in the Wacara dialect, while being attested for the Nuevo Pueblo dialect. In nasal contexts only five vowels can occur. Kakwa has seventeen consonants:

Nasalization In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internationa ...

in Kakwa is a

prosodic In linguistics, prosody () is concerned with elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, str ...

property of the

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

that affects all segments within each morpheme except voiceless stops and glottalized palatal glide in initial position. Each morpheme is either completely nasal or completely oral. Kakwa is a

tonal language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey empha ...

and displays 3 contrastive phonological tones: Rising (LH), falling] (HL), and low (L).

Grammar

The language uses both subject-object-verb and object-verb-subject word order.

Bilingualism and literacy

Reports gathered by SIL International, SIL in 1982 stated that many speakers are monolingual, particularly children. Another promising aspect is that even though literacy is low by international standards, it is higher in the aboriginal language, at around 10%, compared to 5% in Spanish, the opposite situation of most indigenous languages of the Americas. Cacua uses a Latin alphabet.

Sample text

''Ded pah jwiít jwĩ jwíih cãac cha pahatji naáwát''Ded pah jwiít jwĩ jw... 1997
, Ethnologue

References

;Phonology and grammar * *

External links

Colombian Languages Collection of Katherine Bolaños Quiñonez
at the Archive of the indigenous Languages of Latin America. Contains 43 archival recordings of over 1 hour of spoken Kakwa. {{Languages of Colombia Languages of Colombia Languages of Brazil Endangered indigenous languages of the Americas Nadahup languages Kakua–Nukak languages