A Lexical Comparison Between Jaqaru and Kawki
– the Two Varieties of Central Aymara

 

Timothy Feist

Thesis project for M.A. course in Linguistics

University of Manchester, U.K.

supported by a grant from the: Foundation for Endangered Languages.  [Check Up]

 

Background:  Jaqaru, Kawki, and Existing Research on These Varieties

Aymara is well-known as one of the main surviving indigenous Andean languages, it’s main southern (or ‘Altiplano’) variety spoken by up to a million and a half people in southern Peru, much of highland Bolivia, and neighbouring parts of Chile.  Much less-well known are the two surviving though highly endangered varieties of Central Aymara*, spoken some 800 km away in the remote arid mountains of Central Peru.  Although there remain around a thousand speakers of the Jaqaru variety of Central Aymara, the Kawki variety is almost extinct;  it is already obsolescent and indeed moribund.  The handful of surviving truly native speakers are all over the age of seventy, and even among them Kawki is no longer in any effective use by any speakers as a means of everyday communication, which is now uniquely in Spanish. 

A separate research project is currently underway into the phonological system of Kawki, so this thesis focuses on one aspect of the variation between Jaqaru and Kawki, namely lexical differences.  Building on a limited quantified comparison recently made of lexical differences between these varieties within a wider survey of Andean language varieties, this research now aims to survey differences much more widely across the lexicon.  It will involve a short period of fieldwork in the village of Canchán (where almost all the surviving Kawki speakers now live) to try to ascertain more accurately the real extent to which the lexicons of these two varieties differ from each other. 

No dictionary of Kawki exists, though a native speaker of Jaqaru, Neli Belleza Castro, has produced a Jaqaru-Spanish/Spanish-Jaqaru dictionary (Belleza 1995) [Check Up], which within this project will serve as the basis for comparison with the as yet unrecorded Kawki lexicon.  Indeed the only published data of any sort on the Kawki lexicon consists of occasional mention, in Belleza 1995, of Kawki equivalents alongside a small number of the Jaqaru entries, in those few cases where the author was aware that the Kawki term differed. 

 

Research Method

This project will therefore begin by compiling a list of the differences noted in Belleza 1995, and then verifying them with a native speaker of Kawki.  It will then move on to the main new research effort, a survey of other possible lexical differences that are not recorded in Belleza 1995.  There are a number of potential difficulties in establishing a valid lexical comparison between varieties such as Jaqaru and Kawki, which are only exacerbated by the obsolescence of Kawki in particular, and the dominance first of Quechua and particularly now of Spanish as sources of loanwords for both varieties.  Not only are written resources limited to just the single, rather slim volume of Belleza 1995, which inevitably offers a ‘one-sided’ perspective on lexical difference between the two varieties;  but for Kawki the only alternative, fieldwork (with very elderly informants) also faces a number of inconsistencies inherent in lexical elicitation work.  Informants may not always recall and volunteer all relevant lexemes in a given semantic field, and different informants may provide slightly different subsets of more or less synonymous lexemes, when in fact they all know all the terms cited by other informants too.  Particularly for our comparative purposes, there is a clear danger that these vagaries of elicitation work, together with possible lacunae also in Belleza 1995, may conspire to overstate the true extent of the difference between the Kawki and Jaqaru lexicons.  To guard against such a danger, our research is compelled to follow an exhaustive and multi-stage cross-checking process for any possible lexical differences encountered. 

•    Stage 1:  elicit from Kawki informants a word in Spanish to which they are asked to give the Kawki equivalent.  Responses will be compared to the Jaqaru entries in Belleza’s dictionary and careful attention paid to any lexical differences encountered.  Since the comparison is only lexical, purely phonetic differences between obviously cognate lexemes will be disregarded.  The method can also be applied in reverse at this stage, giving the Jaqaru word and eliciting the Spanish.

•    Stage 2:  after a certain period of time to ensure that the previous elicitation session is no longer fresh in the informant’s mind, .  This stage will involve me giving the informant the responses previously elicited and checking if the same source word is given as the response.  If this is not the case, I will attempt to ascertain why not.

•    Stage 3:  cross-check any lexical differences identified in the previous stages with a speaker of the Jaqaru variety, to confirm whether these words are in fact also found in their variety, whether with an identical or – more usefully for our comparative purposes – a distinct meaning.

 

Value, Importance and Urgency of This Research

It is the acute endangerment of Kawki, as noted above, which gives this research its paramount urgency, and calls for further documentation work that could build on the basis of this preliminary investigation.  The potential value of our data lies in two key characteristics of Kawki which put it in a position to provide peculiarly valuable data on key issues in Andean linguistics.  Firstly, Kawki’s apparently relatively conservative linguistic traits not only vis‑à‑vis southern (Altiplano) Aymara but also even with regard to Jaqaru, mean that it can be expected to harbour data of value to the study of proto-Aymara and the historical development of the Aymara family.  Secondly, their geographical location within mostly Quechua-speaking ‘territory’ (at least until those varieties too began to die out in recent centuries) has led the Central Aymara varieties to adopt particularly large numbers of Quechua loanwords, which indeed account for a fair proportion of the known lexical differences between Kawki and Jaqaru.  Hitherto unrecognised Quechua loanwords in Kawki could shed valuable light on the relationships between Central Aymara and earlier and now dying varieties of Quechua.  This too could help inform the long-running debates on the origins and expansions of the two language families, and thereby perhaps even the vexed ‘Quechumara’ issue of whether or not the two families are ultimately related to each other.

The importance of this research project thus work lies in collecting a corpus of these potentially crucial data before they are lost forever with the imminent extinction of Kawki, which so far still almost entirely undocumented.  It is a corpus of data that we may serve future linguists even many years after fieldwork is sadly no longer an option.

 

* For details on the policy we adopt on language names, click here [Check Up] .