Baure or Bauré is an endangered
Arawakan language spoken by only 40 of the thousand
Baure people of the
Beni Department
Beni (), sometimes El Beni, is a northeastern Departments of Bolivia, department of Bolivia, in the lowlands region of the country. It is the second-largest department in the country (after Santa Cruz), covering 213,564 square kilometers (82,458 ...
of northwest of
Magdalena,
Bolivia
Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia, is a landlocked country located in central South America. The country features diverse geography, including vast Amazonian plains, tropical lowlands, mountains, the Gran Chaco Province, w ...
. Some
Bible
The Bible is a collection of religious texts that are central to Christianity and Judaism, and esteemed in other Abrahamic religions such as Islam. The Bible is an anthology (a compilation of texts of a variety of forms) originally writt ...
portions have been translated into Bauré. Most speakers have been shifting to
Spanish.
In 2010, the language had around 20 native speakers left, based on the evidence available. Since Supreme Decree N.25894 in 2000, it has been considered one of the official
indigenous languages of Bolivia
The languages of Bolivia include Spanish language, Spanish and several dozen indigenous languages, most prominently Aymara language, Aymara, Quechua language, Quechua, Chiquitano language, Chiquitano, Eastern Bolivian Guaraní language, Guaraní ...
, which was included in the
Political Constitution passed on 7 February 2009.
History and demography
According to the data of Crevels and Muysken (2009) and Crevels (2012), the number of Baure speakers had risen to 67. However, it is still considered a language in serious danger of extinction. Danielson (2012) counted 3000 to 5000 members of the Baure ethnic group, mostly living in the Baure municipality and surrounding communities, such as El Carmen. The majority of the people who can speak fluid Baure are over 60 years old. Around 500 people, older than 40 years, are considered passively knowledgeable in Baure. All Baure speakers are bilingual in Spanish, though the proficiency level of older speakers is basic. The language is spoken in limited contexts, such as elderly people at home, greetings, jokes, folktales, ritual conversations, and in songs, particularly the Song of the Baures, which is sung as part of festivals. Thanks to literacy workshops in the low counties and study of the language, the language has experienced a surge in use, with many speakers beginning to use it daily and transmit it to their children.
[Danielsen, Swintha. 2012. Baure. In: Pieter Muysken & Mily Crevels (eds), Las lenguas de Bolivia. Volume 2: Amazonía. La Paz: Plural Editors, 295-339.]
The history of the Baures and other communities in the
Llanos de Mojos region can be divided into five major periods or moments of change: the
pre-Hispanic era, the era of the
Jesuits
The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order (Catholic), religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rom ...
, the period of the exploitation of
rubber
Rubber, also called India rubber, latex, Amazonian rubber, ''caucho'', or ''caoutchouc'', as initially produced, consists of polymers of the organic compound isoprene, with minor impurities of other organic compounds.
Types of polyisoprene ...
in the late 19th century, the mid-20th century with its significant reforms and policies, and the era of growing indigenous awareness and politicization, reflected in an
indigenous movement beginning in the 1990s. Thanks to this movement, indigenous identity acquired a new value, indigenous self-confidence improved and, with it, the appreciation of traditional cultures and customs, as well as interest in native languages, such as Baure.
Classification
Baure belongs to the Arawakan language family, more specifically the Southern Arawakan languages, the branch to which the
Moxo languages also belong, including Trinitarian, Ignacian, Loretano, and Javierano. Baure is most closely related, in lexical and grammatical terms, to the Trinitarian and Ignatian Moxo languages. One of the distinctive characteristics of Baure, with respect to Moxo languages, is the loss of final vowels.
Phonology
Baure has 14 consonants, including the glottal stop, whose phonemic status is still not very clear. Four allophones are also observed, which appear in parentheses in table 1:
Baure has four basic vowels, which are not distinguished by length or nasality: i, e, o and a. The vowel o can also be realized as
often in combination with the semivowel w.
Orthography
Vowels
* a -
* e -
�/e* i -
/ɪ* o -
/ɔ/u
Consonants
* ch/č/z -
͡ʃ[, [d͡ʒafter n
* h/j - [h">_[d͡ʒ.html" ;"title="͡ʃ[, [d͡ʒ">͡ʃ[, [d͡ʒafter n
* h/j - [h* k/c/qu/g - [k], [g] after n
* m - [m]
* n - [n]
* p/b - [p], [b] after m
* r/l - [r/l]
* s - [s]
* sh/š/x - [ʃ]
* t/d - [t], [d] after n
* v/b - [β/b]
* w/hu/u - [w]
* y - [j]
* '/h - [ʔ]
Grammar
Baure has an
active–stative syntax.
[Aikhenvald, "Arawak", in Dixon & Aikhenvald, eds., ''The Amazonian Languages'', 1999.]
Noun Classes and Morphology
Nouns,
adjectives and
verbs are open word classes in Baure.
Adverbs An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by ans ...
constitute a semi-closed word class, and closed word classes are
possessive
A possessive or ktetic form (Glossing abbreviation, abbreviated or ; from ; ) is a word or grammatical construction indicating a relationship of possession (linguistics), possession in a broad sense. This can include strict ownership, or a numbe ...
,
personal and
demonstrative pronouns,
articles, clause connectors and other particles. Personal
clitics
In Morphology (linguistics), morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , Back-formation, backformed from Ancient Greek, Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) ...
, which refer to possessors, as in (1), subjects, as in (2), and objects, as in (3), and clausal clitics are important
bound morphemes that function at the phrase and sentence level.
Unlike personal clitics, personal pronouns are not bound morphemes but free and are composed of a clitic and the element -ti', such as piti' 'you'. Possessive pronouns are made up of three elements: personal clitic + -ti' + -r(o), such as beep' 'yours' in (4):
Baure presents a set of
demonstrative determiners, which always precede the noun and are distinguished according to three degrees of distance. Table 3 shows the demonstrative determinants and articles.
Regarding nouns, three groups are distinguished according to their possession capacity: possession nouns proper, which are linked forms that cannot be used without the marking of the possessor and include kinship terms, e.g. =shir 'son', body parts, e.g. =wojis 'hand', and some other specific elements, e.g. =wer 'house'; non-possessed nouns, which are forms that can be used freely, but from which a possessed form can be derived with the possessive suffix -n(o) 'POS', e.g. e.g. yakis 'firewood' > niyakison 'my firewood', jopi 'pitcher' > nijapin 'my jug'; and nouns that can never be possessed, e.g. ses 'sun', wajis 'star', wapoer 'river'. Nouns can have the following categories marked: plural, as seen in (5), diminutives/augmentatives, as in (6), and locatives, as in (7).
The baure has a noun classification system that is marked through more than 50 classifiers, which are attached to adjectives, numerals and verbs, but also to the compounds of the noun, to refer to the class of which of the nouns is a member noun (human, animal, liquid, food, etc.), as seen in (8):
As for adjectives, three classes are distinguished: bound adjectives, which always have a classifier or the root of a bound noun attached and which describe size, dimension, age and a few other basic concepts, e.g. e.g. cho-pe
ig-CLF:covered'big (knife)', chino-pi
ld-CLF:long&thin'old (thread)'; Class II adjectives that do not have an attached classifier and include, for example, loanwords from Spanish, such as picor 'rogue', sons 'sonso'; and class III adjectives which are derived forms and include, for example, color terms such as mosero-po-n
ed-CLF:crowd-NML'red (fish)', kotipo-sero-n
hite-tooth-NML'white tooth'.
Verbs are the most complex class of words in Baure. They may consist of different main levels of affixation within which there are different sets of affixes that behave in different ways. These levels are the verb stem, which is the most basic lexical element of a verb, the verb stem, which is made up of the stem plus some particular affixes attached to it, and the verb base, which is the actual unit of the verb. meaning of the verb and also its form of citation. Aspectual affixes and valence modifiers can be attached to the base of the verb, which do not change the meaning of the verb, as well as clitics, which can be personal, as seen in Table 4, and clausal.
In Baure, locative adverbs are distinguished, as locative. e.g. ne’ 'here', noiy 'there', temporal adverbs, as p. e.g. katir 'soon, early', nariki 'now, today', adverbs of degree, as e.g. imir 'very', ijiriaw 'so much', adverbs of mode, as e.g. kik, kiyok 'really', moeh 'certainly', etc.
Furthermore, a set of connecting particles are distinguished e.g. ach 'and', apo 'or', tiwe' 'but', etc.
Syntax
In Baure, the least marked order of constituents is VSO, with the verb or non-verbal predicate at the beginning of the clause.
In Baure, it is very common, however, to have only one central argument represented by an explicit NP, that is VS or VO, as seen in (10a) and (10b):
The imperative is marked through the nominalizing suffix -no 'NML', as seen in (11):
For negation, the negative particle nga 'no' is used, or other more specific particles, such as porok 'never', which always precede the verb or the predicate, as observed in (12a) and (12b):
Only a few questions include an interrogative particle, as seen in (13). In most cases, questions are constructed as specific interrogative predicates, as in (14), where the question for a person's name is constructed on the verb -woyo- 'to have a name' in the reduplicated form, or in (15), where the question about someone's identity is constructed based on the verb -woyik- 'to be'. As seen in these examples, most questions in Baure are marked by the nominalizing suffix -n(o) 'NML', which is attached to the main verb.
See also
*
Llanos de Moxos (archaeology)
References
External links
Lenguas de Bolivia (online edition)
Documentation of Endangered Languages: Baure
{{authority control
Arawakan languages
Critically endangered languages
Indigenous languages of the Andes
Indigenous languages of the South American Northwest
Languages of Bolivia
Endangered Indigenous languages of the Americas
Endangered Arawan languages
Mamoré–Guaporé linguistic area