Chaʼpalaa language

(Redirected from Chachi language)

Chaʼpalaa (also known as Chachi or Cayapa) is a Barbacoan language spoken in northern Ecuador by ca. 9,000 ethnic Chachi people.[1]

Chaʼpalaa
RegionEcuador
Native speakers
5,870 (2012)[1]
Barbacoan
  • Southern?
    • Chaʼpalaa
Language codes
ISO 639-3cbi
Glottologchac1249
ELPCha'palaa

"Chaʼpalaa" means "language of the Chachi people." This language was described in part by the missionary P. Alberto Vittadello, who, by the time his description was published in Guayaquil, Ecuador in 1988, had lived for seven years among the tribe.

Chaʼpalaa has agglutinative morphology, with a Subject-Object-Verb word order.

Chaʼpalaa is written using the Latin alphabet, making use of the following graphemes:

A, B, C, CH, D, DY, E, F, G, GU, HU, I, J, L, LL, M, N, Ñ, P, QU, R, S, SH, T, TS, TY, U, V, Y, and ʼ.

The writing system includes four simple vowels, and four double vowels:

Phonology

edit

Cha'palaa has four vowels: /a, e, i, u/.[2] Cha'palaa has 22 consonant phonemes.[3]

Consonants
Labial Alveolar Palatal Dorsal Glottal
Nasal m n ɲ
Stop voiceless p t k ʔ
voiced b d g
Affricate t͡s t͡ʃ
Fricative f s ʃ χ
Glide j w
Liquid ɾ ʎ

References

edit
  1. ^ a b Chaʼpalaa at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)  
  2. ^ Floyd, Simeon (9 June 2015). "Other-initiated repair in Cha'palaa" (PDF). DeGruyter. Open Linguistics.
  3. ^ Floyd, Simeon (2014). "Four Types of Reduplication in the Cha'palaa Language of Ecuador" (PDF). Voort-Goodwin.
edit