Machiguenga (Matsigenka) is a major
Arawakan language
Arawakan (''Arahuacan, Maipuran Arawakan, "mainstream" Arawakan, Arawakan proper''), also known as Maipurean (also ''Maipuran, Maipureano, Maipúre''), is a language family that developed among ancient indigenous peoples in South America. Branch ...
in the
Campa sub-branch of the family. It is spoken in the
Urubamba River Basin and along the
Manu River in the
Cusco
Cusco, often spelled Cuzco (; qu, Qusqu ()), is a city in Southeastern Peru near the Urubamba Valley of the Andes mountain range. It is the capital of the Cusco Region and of the Cusco Province. The city is the list of cities in Peru, seventh m ...
and
Madre de Dios departments
Department may refer to:
* Departmentalization, division of a larger organization into parts with specific responsibility
Government and military
*Department (administrative division), a geographical and administrative division within a country, ...
of
Peru by around 6,200 people. According to Ethnologue, it is experiencing pressure from
Spanish and
Quechua in the Urubamba region, but is active and healthy in the Manu region (most speakers are monolingual in Matsigenka). It is close enough to
Nomatsiguenga that the two are sometimes considered dialects of a single language; both are spoken by the
Machiguenga people.
Nanti is partially mutually intelligible but ethnically distinct.
There is extensive morphological inflection in Matsigenka; it is considered to be
polysynthetic and features an
agglutinative morphology, where both suffixes and prefixes are used to mark various
inflectional categories.
Phonology
Consonants
* Sounds /p, t, tʲ/ are heard as voiced
, d, dʲafter nasal consonants. They may also be heard as prenasalized
b, ⁿdin word-initial positions.
* /β/ can be heard as approximant sounds
, β̞intervocalically between /a/. It can also be heard as a voiced plosive
after nasals, and as prenasal
bin word-initial position.
* Sounds /ɣ, ɣʲ/ can be heard as approximant sounds
, ɰʲintervocalically in syllable-initial position, and /ɣʲ/ as
in free variation in word-initial position. They are also heard as
, ɡʲafter nasal sounds. /ɣ, ɣʲ/ can be heard as prenasal
ɡ, ᵑɡʲin word-initial position.
* /n/ can be heard as
before velar sounds.
Vowels
* /i, u/ can be heard as semivowels
, jwhen preceding vowels.
References
Languages of Peru
Campa languages
{{Arawakan-lang-stub