The Wichí languages are an indigenous language family spoken by the
Wichí in northwestern Argentina and far-southeastern Bolivia, part of the
Matacoan family. They are also known as Mataco, Wichi, Wichí Lhamtés, Weenhayek, Noctenes, Matahuayo, Matako, Weʃwo. The name ''Mataco'' is common but pejorative.
Status
Currently, the Argentine government does not have education in indigenous languages in schools. Because the Wichí have to be fluent in Spanish to access government services, and children are only educated in Spanish, Wichí children only speak Spanish among themselves. This has made all Wichí dialects vulnerable to extinction.
In 2010, the province of
Chaco in Argentina declared Wichí as one of four provincial official languages alongside Spanish and the indigenous
Moqoit and
Qom
Qom (; ) is a city in the Central District of Qom County, Qom province, Iran, serving as capital of the province, the county, and the district. It is the seventh largest metropolis and also the seventh largest city in Iran. The city is ...
.
Languages
The Wichí languages include the following languages:
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Noktén ( Noctén,
Wichí Lhamtés Nocten), spoken in Bolivia and Argentina
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Vejoz ( Vejo, Pilcomayo, Bermejo,
Wichí Lhamtés Vejoz), spoken in Argentina and Bolivia
*
Wiznay ( Güisnay,
Wichí Lhamtés Güisnay), spoken in Argentina.
The Argentine
National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC) gives a figure of 36,135 Wichí speakers in Argentina.
In Rosario, the third biggest city of Argentina, there is a community of about 10,000
Wichí people
The Wichí are a group indigenous people of South America. They are a large group of tribes, inhabiting the headwaters of the Bermejo River and the Pilcomayo River, in Argentina and Bolivia.
Notes on designation
This ethnic group was referred ...
, all of them fluent in Wichí, and some native speakers. There are a couple of bilingual primary schools.
For Bolivia, Alvarsson estimated between 1,700 and 2,000 speakers in 1988; a census reported 1,912, and Díez Astete & Riester (1996) estimated between 2,300 and 2,600 Weenhayek in sixteen communities.
According to Najlis (1968) and Gordon (2005), three main dialects can be distinguished in the Wichí group: southwestern or Vejós (Wehwós), northeastern or Güisnay (Weenhayek) and northwestern or Nocten (Oktenay). Tovar (1981) and other authors claim the existence of only two dialects (northeastern and southwestern), while Braunstein (1992–3)
[, citing .] identifies eleven ethnic subgroups.
Wichí languages are predominantly
suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...
ing and
polysynthetic
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able t ...
; verbal words have between 2 and 15 morphemes. Alienable and inalienable
possession is distinguished. The phonological inventory is large, with simple,
glottalized
Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. Glottalization of vowels and other sonorants is most often realized as creaky voice (partial closure). Glottalization of obstruent conso ...
and
aspirated stops and
sonorant
In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels a ...
s. The number of
vowel
A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
s varies with dialect (five or six).
Notes
References
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External links
Argentinian Languages Collection of Lucía Golluscio containing audio recordings of Wichí, at the
Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America.
Wichí(
Intercontinental Dictionary Series)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wichi Language
Languages of Argentina
Languages of Bolivia
Languages of Chile
Indigenous culture of the Gran Chaco
Matacoan languages
Chaco linguistic area