The Choco languages are a small family of Native American languages spread across Colombia and Panama. They consist of the following groups:
- Emberan languages , with over 60,000 speakers mainly in Colombia (a fairly mutually intelligible set divided into 6 languages by the Ethnologue)
- Woun Meu language , or Wounaan, with some 6000 speakers on the Panama-Colombia border
- Anserma language (extinct)
- Runa language (extinct)
- Arma language (extinct)
- Cenu language (extinct)
- Cauca language (extinct)
They are classified by Joseph Greenberg as Nuclear Paezan languages - most closely related to the Paezan and Barbacoan families - while others, seeing his conclusions as over-hasty, prefer to consider them an isolated group.
Bibliography
- Loewen Jacob, 1963. "Choco I & Choco II ", IJAL 29.
- Mortensen, Charles A. A Reference Grammar of the Northern Embera Languages. Studies in the Languages of Colombia 7. SIL Publications in Linguistics 134, 1999
- Licht, Daniel Aguirre. Embera. Languages of the World/Materials 208. LINCOM 1999.
External links
Last updated: 08-02-2005 02:39:02
