New observations in Areal Typology about Indigenous Languages spoken in Colombian Amazonia

Abstract

Van Gijn et al. (2017) and Epps and Michael (2017) expose the linguistic split of Colombian Amazonia between Vaupés and Western Zone. The present study reviews this information in Areal Typology on the strength of 21 linguistic systems that come from González de Pérez y Rodríguez de Montes (2000), in combination with the phonological and grammatical criteria of Donegan and Stampe (2004; 2009), an adapted territorial scale of Ruiz (2020), and the georeferentiation and cartographic compilation methods of Nerbonne et al. (2018). It is found that Vaupés preserves convergencies in phonology, but not respect to morphological and syntactic properties, where there is a contrast between North and South. The Western Zone includes not only Caquetá or Putumayo languages, but also some languages spoken in the Amazonas department. The Andoque case, that is related to Southern Vaupés in grammar, but Western Tukano (Caquetá-Putumayo) in phonology, sets up the necessity to postulate more than one proposal of territorial division.