Coconuco, also known as Guambiano and Misak, is a
dialect cluster
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varie ...
of
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 ...
spoken by the
Guambiano
Guambiano or Misak are an indigenous people of the department of Cauca in Colombia. he Drama of Life Guambiano Life Cycle Customs , author=Judith Branks, Juan B. Sanchez , publisher- SIL International, date=1978 , pages= 107 Their language is k ...
indigenous people. Though the three varieties, Guambiano, moribund Totoró, and the extinct Coconuco are traditionally called languages, Adelaar & Muysken (2004) believe that they are best treated as a single language.
Totoró may be extinct; it had 4 speakers in 1998 out of an ethnic population of 4,000. Guambiano, on the other hand, is vibrant and growing.
Coconucan was for a time mistakenly included in a spurious
Paezan Paezan (also Páesan, Paezano, Interandine) may be any of several hypothetical or obsolete language-family proposals of Colombia and Ecuador named after the Paez language.
Proposals
Currently, Páez (Nasa Yuwe) is best considered either a langu ...
language family, due to a purported "Moguex" (Guambiano) vocabulary that turned out to be a mix of Páez and Guambiano (Curnow 1998).
Phonology
The Guambiano inventory is as follows (Curnow & Liddicoat 1998:386).
References
Further reading
* Adelaar, Willem F. H.; & Muysken, Pieter C. 2004. ''The languages of the Andes''. Cambridge language surveys. Cambridge University Press.
* Branks, Judith; Sánchez, Juan Bautista. 1978. ''The drama of life: A study of life cycle customs among the Guambiano, Colombia, South America'' (pp xii, 107). Summer Institute of Linguistics Museum of Anthropology Publication (No. 4). Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics Museum of Anthropology.
* Curnow, Timothy Jowan, & Liddicoat, Anthony J. 1998. ''The Barbacoan Languages of Colombia and Ecuador'', Anthropological Linguistics, 40:3:384–408.
* Fabre, Alain. 2005. ''Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos: Guambiano
{{Languages of Colombia
Barbacoan languages
Languages of Colombia
Cauca Department