Lexical Correspondences in the Barbacoan Language Family

Abstract

The Barbacoan language family is made up of four languages: Namtrik, spoken in the department of Cauca-Colombia, Awapit, spoken in south-western Colombia and north-western Ecuador, Tsafiki, spoken in the Ecuadorian Pacific, and the Cha’palaa language, spoken in north-western Ecuador. Although there are synchronic works on these languages, there are very few diachronic studies. In 1998 Curnow and Liddicoat conducted the first comparative study of this family in a contemporary typological framework, which succeeded in establishing the existence of the family; however, their study was based on a very limited corpus, composed mainly of partial studies. In this study we use the comparative method to establish the percentages of shared cognates among the languages of the Barbacoan family, based on recent, first-hand data; we also compare these percentages with the shared cognates among the Barbacoan languages and other languages of the region, in order to revisit the findings of Curnow and Liddicoat (1998) and the internal classification of the Barbacoan family, in the light of new findings.