Jaqaru
and Kawki
Provisional page with a brief presentation – a full article will
appear in due course
Jaqaru is spoken by probably less than one thousand people,
in the village of Tupe (2880m) and a few nearby hamlets (Aiza, Colca), in the
Province of Yauyos, Department of Lima, Peru.
These villages lie approximately 240 km south‑east of the capital
city
The Jaqaru language falls within the language‑family
known variously as Jaqi, Aru, or indeed the ‘Aymara’ family (according to the
preferences of different linguists who have written on them: click here for an explanation of language names and spellings). Other than southern or ‘altiplano’ Aymara,
spoken around lake Titicaca in southern Peru and northern Bolivia (La Paz
region), Jaqaru and the nearby dialect Kawki are the only two surviving
representatives of the whole family. So
geographically Jaqaru is now separated from the nearest Aymara speakers by
about 500 miles (800 km). About 8 hours’
stiff walk over the mountains from Tupe is the village of Cachuy, home to the
closely related dialect Kawki, though the only six elderly surviving speakers we
know of now live lower down in or near the village of Canchán on the road
through the Cañete valley.
Jaqaru is still used as a main language of
everyday communication in and between the main three villages/hamlets where it
is still spoken, at least by all but the youngest speakers (some children under
age ten may appear not to be fluent in it).
However, all speakers are bilingual in Spanish, and often also speak
Spanish amongst themselves, or indeed a mixture of Spanish and Jaqaru. Spanish is also automatically used with any
outsiders. There is no use whatsoever of
Jaqaru in any media, except for a 20‑minute video on the
While the first linguistic studies of Jaqaru
published in the 1960s described the language as in a state of stable
bilingualism with Spanish, as it then was, in recent years it has started to
look increasingly clear to linguists that things are beginning to change
markedly, and that Jaqaru too has already started to come under serious threat,
putting its long‑term survival clearly in doubt unless something is done
very soon to support it, hence the Jaqmashi bilingual (Spanish and Jaqaru) education programme.
For more details, see this article in Spanish: Al Borde del Silencio by Dante Oliva León. (An English translation will be available later).
Bibliography of Works on the Jaqaru Language
The standard (and pretty much only) linguistic descriptions of Jaqaru sound and grammar systems are:
Hardman, Martha J. (1983) Jaqaru: compendio de estructura fonológica y morfológica
Instituto
de Estudios Peruanos: Lima, Peru
In: Spanish
Availability: IEP
Hardman,
Martha J. (2000) Jaqaru
Lincom
Europa:
Prices (2002): US$50 GB£35
In: English Availability: Mail Order
The only existing Jaqaru
dictionary is:
Belleza Castro, Neli (1995) Vocabulario Jacaru-Castellano Castellano-Jacaru
Centro
Bartolomé de las Casas: Cuzco, Peru
Prices (2002): US$7 S/.25
In: Jaqaru-Spanish Availability: CBC
This book is now sold out and no longer available from
bookshops but I can get hold of a copy for you if you email me to ask. Most remaining copies were bought up by the
NGO Jaqmashi which works in support of the Jaqaru-speaking people,
including with a bilingual Jaqaru-Spanish education project which is why they
have acquired the dictionaries for use in the local schools.
For more publications on Jaqaru,
another source is Dr Martha Hardman’s personal
publications list. Other material about Jaqaru can be found in
books on the wider Aymara family. For my
online short bibliography on the
related Aymara language, click here.
Links to Other Websites on Jaqaru and the Aymara Language Family
The first, and for a long time only linguist to have worked
intensively on the Jaqaru language is Dr Martha Hardman, at the
For much more on the Aymara
language family in general your first port of call should be the Aymara Uta website at
www.aymara.org. This is a great site covering both the
southern Aymara and the other members of the family, Jaqaru
and Kawki still spoken (just!) in a few
villages in the mountains of central
Alphabets for Jaqaru
There are two main competing
alphabets for the Aymara languages:
for Jaqaru and Kawki this means Martha Hardman’s original one, and the
newer ‘official’ one. Both are good
alphabets on sound linguistic principles (they are both phonemic, and therefore
correctly use only three vowels: other,
Spanish‑influenced attempts to spell with five vowels are not
suitable for these languages). The
official alphabet, however, is the one that is in accordance with the pan‑Andean
standards for the unification (as far as the languages sound systems permit, of
course) of the orthography for all Andean languages, adopted officially in
What’s Special about the
Jaqaru Language?
Plenty of things!!!
Here for a start is just one fascinating facet of Jaqaru and similar
languages of the
Certain distinctive characteristics of the Aymara (and Quechua) languages have been argued to be related even to a different ‘world view’ of their speakers. These include particularly the status of ‘humanness’ and 2nd person, and (as in most varieties of Quechua too), the need always to state, in order to be grammatically correct, one’s source of information and/or degree of conviction about any assertion one makes. Some of these have been carried over into Andean Spanish (for example its use of the había sido ‘pluperfect’ for surprise mood, and as a ‘not personally experienced past’ tense), see Lipski (1994). For some fuller articles on these issues, see:
Hardman, Martha J. (1972) Postulados lingüísticos del idioma aymara
in:
Escobar, A. (Ed.): El reto del multilingüismo en el Perú
Instituto
de Estudios Peruanos: Lima, Peru
In: Spanish
Hardman,
Martha J. (1978) Linguistic Postulates and Applied Anthropological
Linguistics
in:
Honsa, V. & M.J.Hardman, : Papers on Linguistics and Child Language -
Ruth Hirsch Weir Memorial Volume
Mouton
de Gruyter: the Hague
In: English
Hardman,
Martha J. (1988) Andean Ethnography: The role of language structure in
observer bias
in:
Semiotica - 71-3/4: 339-372
In: English
Language Names and Spellings
Please click to link to our main explanation on language names and spellings for the Andean languages.
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