Native to Perú Glottolog mats1245 | Native speakers 6,200 (2007) | |
Ethnicity 13,000 Machiguenga (2007) Language family Arawakan
Southern
Campa
Machiguenga ISO 639-3 Either:
mcb – Machiguenga
cox – Nanti (Pucapucari) | ||
Machiguenga (Matsigenka) is a major Arawakan language in the Campa sub-branch of the family. It is spoken in the Urubamba River Basin and along the Manu River in the Cusco and Madre de Dios provinces of Peru by around 6,200 people. According to Ethnologue, it is experiencing pressure from Spanish and Quechua in the Urubamba region, but is active and healthy in the Manu region (most speakers are monolingual in Matsigenka). It is close enough to Nomatsiguenga that the two are sometimes considered dialects of a single language; both are spoken by the Machiguenga people. Nanti is partially mutually intelligible but ethnically distinct.
There is extensive morphological inflection in Matsigenka; it is considered to be polysynthetic and features an agglutinative morphology, where both suffixes and prefixes are used to mark various inflectional categories.