The languages of the Andes (review)

This book constitutes an unprecedented contribution to the study of the linguistic reality, past and present, of the Andean countries and indeed of almost all of Indo-Hispanic South America. It is unique for the breadth and depth of its approach to the topics discussed. A study of such scope could not be the work of a single person, and thus, although most of the work was done by Willem Adelaar, it required the equally valuable support of his colleague Pieter Muysken.

The work contains seven chapters. The first chapter delimits Andean space as a geographic, cultural, and historical unit, divided into ‘spheres’, and recounts the development of the linguistic studies of the region, attempts at classification, and postulated genetic relationships. Ch. 2, ‘The Chibcha sphere’, deals with the languages of the Andean region of Venezuela and Colombia. Ch. 3, the longest, entitled ‘The Inca sphere’, focuses on the languages of the ancient territory of the Inca Empire. Ch. 4, ‘The languages of the eastern slopes’, discusses the languages of the eastern foothills of the Andes and the Upper Amazon basin, territories found in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia and which include the Bolivian, Paraguayan, and Argentinian Chaco. In Ch. 5, ‘The Araucanian sphere’, the languages of the Chilean coast and central Andean range and those of south-central Argentina are studied. The languages of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego are covered in Ch. 6. Ch. 7, ‘The Spanish presence’, examines the influence of indigenous and African languages on Spanish spoken in the region. The book ends with an appendix listing the languages and linguistic families of the area (610–24), including the demography of still-existing languages.

The central chapters (Chs. 2–6) give extensive information on the distribution, demography, history, sociolinguistic reality, and investigations of the languages studied. In an impressive effort, the authors offer profiles of the languages, individually or as entire families, with excellent grammatical outlines, highlighting shared typological features, and emending proposed relationships or proposing genetic lineages. Obviously, the varying amounts of information about the most representative languages or families were determined by access to investigations about them. In some cases, for sociohistorical reasons, there was prodigious information, while in other cases, either because the languages are extinct or because they have not been comprehensively studied, information was scarce. The following masterly monographs stand out: (a) in the Chibchan sphere, the studies of Muisca (81–109); (b) in the Inca sphere, those of the Quechuan (179–259) and Aymaran (259–319) families, and that of Mochica (319–50); and (c) in the Araucanian sphere, that of Mapuche (508–44). In each case, the phonology, grammar, and lexicon of the language are offered, in addition to a representative sample text, analyzed and annotated.

This book is surprising from the outset for its broad coverage, unusual by the standards of those of us who consider ourselves specialists in the different disciplines of the region. This is because traditionally the Andean region is understood to correspond to the ‘Inca sphere’, the zone bounded by the territory of the Inca Empire. The concept of ‘Andean region’ that the authors utilize, though, coincides with that postulated by some archaeologists for whom ‘Andean’ is defined in geographic and spatial terms (the Andes mountain range), putting special emphasis on the context in which the pertinent civilizations evolved. Theoretically, we do not doubt the relationships existing among the peoples that developed in a ‘macro-Andean’ space. Nevertheless, even accepting such a delimitation, in practice, the archaeologists who work in Patagonia, the Chaco, or the Colombian valleys of Santa Marta, and even those who investigate the transition zones of the Amazon plains, do not consider themselves to be doing Andean archaeology; nor do the historians or linguists of such realities consider themselves specialists in Andean issues, as is quite obvious in the habitual local and international conferences. Therefore, this work, inscribed within a macro conception of Andean territory, is disconcerting both to...