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Kakwa language
The Kakwa or Cacua language is an endangered language spoken by a little over a hundred people in North Western South America in the early 1980s However use of the language has been described as "vigorous" by Ethnologue.
Overview
The language is spoken by Indigenous American, Cacua people that live in Colombian and Brazilian interfluvial tropical forests higher than 200 m in elevation. The people have simple traditional livelihoods such as nomadic Hunting-gathering and swidden agriculture. There are also some non native speakers of Cacua that are predominantly missionary workers that have worked on evangelizing the native community as well as translating religious Christian texts, notably the Christian Bible.
Literacy
Reports gathered by SIL in 1982 described that many speakers are monolingual, particularly children, the later of which is positive for linguistic survivability. Another promising aspect is that even though literacy is low by international standards but still unlike most Indigenous Languages of the Americas literacy is higher in the aboriginal language around 10% as to Spanish, under 5%, the dominant national language of Colombia where all the speakers reported by Ethnologue reside within.
Range
The speakers are located in Wacara which is 30 km from Mitu in the lower Vaupes Region. .
Grammar, Literature, Orthography
The language uses both the Subject-Object-Verb and Object-Verb-Subject grammatical constructs in speech.
Moreover in 1975 bible portions had been translated into the written form of this language providing a basis of literature although not native literature. In 2008 the bible had been completely translated, but most are illiterate and it was recorded into audio in its entirety.
Cacua uses a variation of the Latin Alphabet.
Sample text in Cacua
Ded pah jwiit jwi jwiih caac cha pahatji naawat
Related languages
Some speakers are reported to be bilingual by Ethnologue in the Cubeo, Desano, and Guanano languages, but not Spanish, which seemingly contradicts the fact that about 5% were reported to be literate in that language. It may be inferred that Spanish is only used as a literary language.
There are two dialects Vaupes Cacua and Macu-Parana Cacua.
Cacua is mutually intelligible with Nukak, and is considered a dialect of the latter by Martins (1999).
Other names for this language include: Macu de Cubeo, Macu de Guanano, Macu de Desano, Bada, and Kakwa.
External links
Entry for Cacua at Rosetta Project
Global Recordings - Cacua audio recordings
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Kakwa language
