Native to Paraguay, Bolivia Native speakers 4,300 (2006–2009) Dialects Tsiracua | Ethnicity Ayoreo people Language family Zamucoan
Ayoreo | |
Region Chaco, Alto Paraguay departments (Paraguay), Santa Cruz department (Bolivia) | ||
Ayoreo is a Zamucoan language spoken in both Paraguay and Bolivia. It is also known as Morotoco, Moro, Ayoweo, Ayoré, and Pyeta Yovai. However, the name "Ayoreo" is more common in Bolivia, and "Morotoco" in Paraguay. It is spoken by Ayoreo, an indigenous ethnic group traditionally living on a combined hunter-gatherer and farming lifestyle.
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Classification
Ayoreo is classified as a Zamucoan language, along with Chamacoco. Extinct Guarañoca may have been a dialect.
Geographic distribution
Ayoreo is spoken in both Paraguay and Bolivia, with 3,771 speakers total, 3000 of those in Paraguay and 771 in Bolivia. Within Paraguay, Ayoreo is spoken in the Chaco Department and the northern parts of the Alto Paraguay Department. In Bolivia, it is spoken in the Gran Chaco Province, in the Santa Cruz Department.
Phonology
Bertinetto (2009) reports that Ayoreo has the following vowels, which appear both as oral and nasal:
Grammar
The prototypical constituent order is subject-verb-object, as seen in the following examples (Bertinetto 2009:45-46):
Ayoreo is a fusional language.
Verbs agree with their subjects, but there is no tense-inflection. Consider the following paradigm, which has prefixes marking person and suffixes marking number (Bertinetto 2009:29):
When the verb root contains a nasal, there are nasalized variants of the agreement affixes:
Ayoreo is a mood-prominent language. Nouns can be divided into possessable and non-possessable; possessor agreement is expressed through a prefixation. The syntax of Ayoreo is characterized by the presence of para-hypotactical structures.