Introduction

A recent volume published by Lyle Campbell (2018) provides a comprehensive overview of the language isolates in the world and highlights the situation in South America, where such isolates are found to be particularly numerous. This extreme linguistic diversity is unexpected considering the relatively short history of human occupation in the South American subcontinent (possibly less than 15,000 years) and the comparatively high genetic uniformity of its indigenous population. So far, no convincing explanation has been found for the process of diversification underlying this state of affairs. It may appear that, for reasons not yet understood, linguistic differentiation occurred in an accelerated, possibly chaotic manner during early stages of human occupation in the Americas. In more recent time periods accessible to inspection, there are relatively few signs of unusually rapid historical change. The overall pattern is one of gradual diversification similar to that of other, better known linguistic areas in the world, such as, for instance, Europe.

A possible method to obtain a greater understanding of the genesis and past of some of the language isolates in South America may consist in a systematic study of lexical and structural properties that might link each of them to other documented language families and isolates in the subcontinent. In the absence of obvious genealogical connections based on a classic comparative approach, the evidence of prehistoric contact as well as areal features deserves special attention (e.g., Adelaar 2012; Pache 2018a). It appears that some South American language isolates fit more or less well the typological signature of the ethnolinguistic environment in which they are situated, whereas other isolates seem to be typologically alien to the areas in which they continue to exist. Several small families and isolates of the Amazonian region may belong to the former category, whereas notorious typological outliers, such as Mochica in the Andean Pacific area, but also Nambikwaran, Trumai, and Yathê, in the South American lowlands may represent the latter category.

In the present chapter we intend to look at another intractable isolate, namely, Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche (“people of the land”) in southern Chile and Argentina.

The present chapter deals with the languages of the northern Andes; the term ‘Chibcha Sphere’ has been chosen because of the historically important role of the Chibcha people in that area. In the Sixteenth century the Chibcha or Muisca were the inhabitants of the highland region that coincides with the modern Colombian departments of Boyacá and Cundinamarca. Although historical sources insist that there was no linguistic unity, it is likely that most Chibcha spoke closely related languages or dialects belonging to a subgroup of the Chibchan language family. At least two languages have been identified: Muisca was spoken on the upland plain (sabana) surrounding the present-day Colombian capital Santafé de Bogotá (department of Cundinamarca) and Duit in the department of Boyacá. By their location in the highlands east of the Magdalena river valley, close to the Amazonian plains, the Chibcha held a peripheral position in the Colombian Andes. Therefore, their linguistic influence on other parts of that area must not be overestimated.

The Chibcha were a populous agricultural nation, who specialised in the cultivation of potatoes and cotton. They were divided into several chiefdoms, two of which occupied a leading position. A southern chiefdom, centred in Bacatá or Muequetá (near the modern town of Funza, close to present-day Bogotá), was ruled by a king called the zipa.

On Tierra del Fuego, the archipelagos surrounding it and the neighbouring mainland, Patagonia, nine indigenous languages were spoken, of which only a few have survived to the present day. With respect to the peoples of Tierra del Fuego, a distinction is made traditionally between the canoe nomads, including the Chono, the Kawesqar and the Yahgan, and the foot nomads, including the Haush and the Selkʹnam. In the latter group the Gününa Küne, the Tehuelche and the Tehues or Teushen are also included (Clairis 1985).

As Guyot (1968) notes, the area of Tierra del Fuego had already been visited by eighty-one exploratory expeditions by the time the HMS Beagle, carrying Charles Darwin, passed through the area. Different visitors projected different images onto the nomadic groups they encountered. Thus Darwin writes: ‘The language of these people, according to our notions, scarcely deserves to be called articulate’ ([1906] 1983: 195). The Fuegians could be seen as a decidedly lower step in human development, in his perception.

It was against this view that Thomas Bridges, a missionary in the area from 1869 to 1887 on behalf of the South American Missionary Society, argued with his massive 30,000-word Yahgan–English dictionary.

Manuel Tenorio, over sixty years old, and a Quechua peasant from central Ecuador, recounts how he learned Spanish as a boy, on the job at the hacienda and during visits to the market town. When a white man came by on horseback, Manuel was obliged to say the greeting alabado sacramento ‘blessed (be the) Sacrament’ or alabado evangelio ‘blessed (be the) Gospel’, and was answered back alabado hijo ‘blessed (be the) Son’ (perhaps also ‘blessed, sonny’). However, as a Quechua speaker he had great difficulties with the vowels [e] and [o] (often pronouncing them as [ⅰ] and [u], respectively), and the punishment for mispronunciation was fierce, so he used to dive into the irrigation channel when he heard a horse approaching. Almost at the end of his life, in spite of years in the capital as a construction worker, his Spanish still shows many traces of his Indian background.

The Spaniards have imposed their language in all their former colonies in the New World. Not only the immigrants from Europe speak Spanish, but the descendants of the African slaves and Chinese coolies, and a large part of the native Amerindian population as well. Nonetheless, the transplanted forms of the language have undergone many modifications, as in the speech of Manuel Tenorio, and the relationship between Spanish and the dominated Amerindian languages is a complex one.

In this chapter we discuss various aspects of the relation between Spanish and the native languages of the Andes.

As the alter ego of Mario Vargas Llosa strolls through Florence, trying to put all matters Peruvian out of his mind in order to read Machiavelli and Dante, he stumbles onto an exhibit of dusty photographs of the Machiguenga. In El hablador (The Speaker; 1987), documentary and novel, this nation plays a central role, one of the countless groups of Indians struggling in small bands on the eastern foothills of the Andes and on the Amazonian plains, in order to maintain their cultural and linguistic integrity. This chapter will try to give a necessarily brief account of the very diverse languages of these groups.

Since it is impossible to say precisely where the slopes and foothills end and where the plains begin, we artificially delimit the area discussed in this chapter as the republics of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia east of the Andes. The Chaco area of southeastern Bolivia extends into western Paraguay and into northwestern Argentina, and these are included as well. The Chaco languages are not covered by Dixon and Aikhenvald (1999). For these reasons, we include some material on all of the Chaco languages, even though they merit a more extensive separate treatment. Strictly speaking, this means that too many languages are included: languages of the Amazonian plains cannot properly be called Andean. On the other hand, it turns out that Quechua influence, one of the topics we will be concerned with in this chapter, extends far beyond the foothills.

The term ‘Araucanian Sphere’ has been chosen to cover the central part of what is today the Republic of Chile, extending from the Aconcagua river valley to the island archipelago of Chiloé. At the arrival of the European invaders this area was predominantly inhabited by a single ethnolinguistic group: the Araucanians. This powerful nation became partly incorporated within the colonial society, but also included an important sector which succeeded in preserving its independence until 1882.

In this chapter we furthermore give attention to the central-western part of Argentina, comprising the hilly region known as the Sierra de Córdoba and the Andean foothills region known as Cuyo (including parts of the provinces of Mendoza, San Juan and San Luis). Like the Araucanians, the original inhabitants of central-western Argentina were agriculturalists. They became involved in the process of colonisation right from the beginning, and lost their identity and their languages at an early stage (Martínez Sarasola 1992: 58–63). Of the various native languages that were once spoken in central-western Argentina only the Huarpean languages, Allentiac and Millcayac, have been documented. They constitute a family of closely related languages. Allentiac was spoken in the southern part of San Juan and in northern San Luis, whereas Millcayac extended southward from the culturally important wetlands of Guanacache to the Río Diamante, covering most of Mendoza.

This book took much longer to write than originally intended, particularly because very little was known about some of the regions to be covered, while much new material has become available these last few years. We hope this survey will in its turn inspire new research in the years to come.

We wish to thank first of all Bernard Comrie for his precise and encouraging comments on earlier chapter drafts. We are very grateful to Ana Fernández, Timothy Curnow, Knut Olawsky and Nicholas Ostler for reading and commenting on specific chapters of the book. A special word of thanks goes to Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino for providing us with data from his ongoing research on the Chipaya language, and to Alfredo Torero for permitting us to use his unpublished work on Puquina. Many colleagues and friends have contributed over the years with valuable advice and commentary, by providing us with newly published or little-known publications, or by calling our attention to new materials and research results. Their generosity is duly remembered, although space does not allow us to mention each of them individually.

Our gratitude extends in particular to those academic institutions that have provided the environment and the facilities necessary for an undertaking such as the present one: the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Wassenaar, the Netherlands, the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (RCLT) at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, the Research School CNWS of Asian, African and Amerindian Studies and the Faculty of Letters of Leiden University.

In his book Visión histórica del Perú (A Historical Vision of Peru) the Peruvian historian Pablo Macera (1978) dates the beginning of human presence in the middle Andes at about 20,000 BC. The supposition of such an early human occupation, difficult to explain within the context of New World prehistory, is based on datings relating to excavations conducted by MacNeish at the highland site of Pikimachay of the Pacaicasa complex near Ayacucho (cf. MacNeish 1979). These datings are now considered very controversial (cf. Rick 1988). Although Macera himself recognises the uncertain character of the 20,000 BC date, its value is more than just scientific. It acquires the character of a fictitious date, needed to express the emotional feeling of timeless antiquity often associated with Andean culture and tradition, a feeling that is best put into words by the expression milenarismo andino (‘Andean millenarism’). It is not the cold evidence of radiocarbon datings, but the conscience of an immobile human society that clings fatalistically to age-old agricultural traditions perfectly adjusted to the formidable Andean landscape, that determines the view of the Andean intellectual until today. It is the view of a reality which has always been there, seemingly immune to the triviality of programmes aimed at modernisation and globalisation.

In the meantime, the antiquity of human settlement in the Andean region, indeed in all of South America, remains a matter of debate.

The following list contains an overview of the languages and language families represented in the Andean region (including the Paraguayan languages and some other languages not systematically treated in this book). For some languages it also includes alternative names and names used by ethnolinguistic groups for referring to themselves. Approximative speaker numbers (s.) are given for languages still in use, but it should be remarked that many sources do not make a specific distinction between the number of speakers of a language and the number of members of an ethnic group. For instance, the Colombian statistics usually refer to the totality of ethnic communities and may be too high when used as an indication of language retention. By contrast, Peruvian figures may well be too low because they are based on the results of a census involving questions on language use, of which the answer depends on the willingness of individuals to supply the requested information. Most importantly, both the estimates of speaker numbers and of ethnic group membership may differ widely according to the sources. In this overview, minimum and maximum estimates (separated by a hyphen) are given in cases of contradiction. For very specific high estimates, round figures may be given instead of the original numbers.

Sources that have been consulted for the statistical information are, for Argentina, Censabella (1999); for Colombia, Arango and Sánchez (1998), in an extract kindly provided by Jon Landaburu, and the website Etnias de Colombia (http://www.indigenascolombia.org); for Ecuador, Juncosa (2000); for Paraguay, Meliá (1997); for Peru, Brack and Yáñez (1997), Pozzi-Escot (1998) and Chirinos Rivera (2001); for Venezuela, González Ñáñez (2000) and Mosonyi and Mosonyi (2000).

The term ‘Inca Sphere’ is used to cover the area that falls within the limits of Tahuantinsuyo, ‘the Empire of the Four Quarters’, at the moment of its greatest extension under the Inca ruler Huayna Capac (c. 1520). It roughly coincides with the sphere of predominance of the Middle Andean civilisation before its destruction at the hands of Spanish conquerors in 1532–4. Speaking in modern terms, and from north to south, the Inca Sphere includes the Andean and Pacific regions of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, northern Chile and northern Argentina. (The languages of the Pacific region of northern Ecuador were discussed in chapter 2, whereas information on the Quechua variety spoken in Colombia is found in the present chapter.)

As we have indicated in the introductory chapter, the Middle Andean civilisation did not attain its greatest radiation until shortly before the European invasion. During the Middle Formative (800–400 BC) the predominance of Chavín de Huántar as a centre of cultural influence remained confined to portions of what is now central and northern Peru (Lumbreras 1974: 57–93). The period between 100 BC and AD 600 was marked by political disintegration, whereas the artistic production reached its highest peak in the history of the area with the development of the regional cultures of Paracas, Nazca and Mochica. After the decline of these local cultures, the influence of Pachacamac, situated just south of Lima at the mouth of the Lurín river, and Tiahuanaco on the Bolivian altiplano became strongly felt throughout the area.