Kunza language
| Kunza | |
|---|---|
| Atacama | |
| Likanantaí | |
| Native to | Atacama Desert |
| Ethnicity | Atacama people |
| Extinct | ca. 1950s |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | kuz |
| Glottolog | kunz1244[1] |
Kunza a.k.a. Cunza, also known as Likanantaí, Lipe, Ulipe, or Atacameño, is an extinct language isolate once spoken in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile and southern Perú (specifically in Peine, Socaire (Salar de Atacama), and Caspana) by the Lickan-antay people, who have since shifted to Spanish.
The last Kunza speaker was found in 1949, although some have been found since according to anthropologists.[clarification needed] There are 2,000 Atacameños (W. Adelaar).
Kaufman (1990) found a proposed connection between Kunza and the likewise unclassified Kapixaná to be plausible; however, when that language was more fully described in 2004, it turned out to be an isolate.
Kunza contains a typical 5-vowel inventory: /a, e, i, o, u/. All vowels have long counterparts, and Kunza displays contrastive vowel length.[2]
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Postalveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | ejective | plain | ejective | plain | ejective | plain | ejective | plain | ejective | ||||
| Stop | voiceless | p | pʼ | t | tʼ | k | kʼ | q | qʼ | ʔ | |||
| voiced | b | ||||||||||||
| Affricate | t͡s | t͡ʃ | t͡ʃʼ | ||||||||||
| Fricative | voiceless | s | x | χ | h | ||||||||
| voiced | ɣ | ||||||||||||
| Nasal | m | n | |||||||||||
| Approximant | l | j | |||||||||||
| Flap | ɾ | ||||||||||||
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Kunza". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
- ^ "SAPhon – South American Phonological Inventories". linguistics.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2018-07-18.
External links[edit]
- Kunza Swadesh vocabulary list (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)
- Spanish-Kunza dictionary online
- Bibliography about Kunza
- Alain Fabre, 2005, Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos: KUNZA[1]
| National language | |
|---|---|
| Living Indigenous languages | |
| Extinct and endangered languages | |
| Language families | |
Italics indicate extinct languages | |
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