Paunaka

Paunaka
Spoken in	Chiquitania , Bolivia
speaker	<10 speakers and semi-speakers
Linguistic classification	Arawak South Arawak Paunaka
Language codes
ISO 639-3	P nk

Paunaka is an Arawak language in South America. It belongs to the strongly threatened and as yet hardly explored part of the southern Arawak and is spoken in the Bolivian region of Chiquitanía , near Santa Cruz and north of the Gran Chaco .

One suspects a connection to the already extinct Paiconeca language, which is also part of the Arawak language family. These two languages ​​are therefore usually combined as a dialect group and also referred to as Paunaca, Pauneca or Pauna. The language has been documented, analyzed and described by a team of German linguists since 2009 (see Danielsen & Terhart 2014 et al.).

Through the Spanish colonization, many indigenous languages ​​were displaced for centuries or hardly passed on to the next generations. The main languages ​​in this Bolivian region are therefore Spanish and Chiquitano . The Paunaka currently has only about ten speakers and semi-speakers who live with the Chiquitano in eastern Bolivia. However, 150 people belong to the ethnic group, some of whom still understand Paunaka (data collected by the Paunaka Documentation Project, Danielsen et al. 2014). Due to the low number of speakers, the language is threatened with extinction (UNESCO Atlas, based on Moseley 2010).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Aikhenvald , Alexandra Y .: The Arawak language family. In: RMW Dixon , Alexandra Aikhenvald (Ed.): The Amazonian languages. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999, pp. 65-106. ISBN 0-521-57021-2
2. ↑ Danielsen, Swintha; Terhart, Lena: Paunaka . In: Pieter Muysken; Mily Crevels (ed.): Las Lenguas de Bolivia . tape 3 . Plural Editores, La Paz 2014, pp. 221-258 .
3. ↑ Danielsen, Swintha; Terhart, Lena; Villalta, Federico: Documentation of Paunaka. In: website. ELAR archive, SOAS, London, January 1, 2014, accessed January 8, 2018 (English, Spanish). 
4. ↑ Moseley, Christopher (ed.). 2010. Atlas of the World's Languages ​​in Danger, 3rd edition. Paris, UNESCO Publishing. Online version: ' http://www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages/atlas ; specifically: ' http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/en/atlasmap/language-id-1958.html ; accessed 2018-01-08.

See also

• Indigenous American languages
• Indigenous peoples

Web links

• Paunaka project University of Leipzig
• Endangered Languages ​​Archive: Documentation of Paunaka . Retrieved June 13, 2014. Endangered Languages ​​Archive: Documentation of Paunaka . Retrieved June 13, 2014.
• Native languages ​​Paunaka
• Sebastian Nordhoff, Harald Hammarström, Robert Forkel, Martin Haspelmath (eds.): Paunaca . On the Glottolog 2.2 website . Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig 2013. Accessed June 10, 2014.
• Ethnologue, Languages ​​of the World (16th ed.): Paunaka .