New book: The Chipaya Language

[Serafin M Coronel-Molina (scoronel@Princeton.EDU)]

EL CHIPAYA O LA LENGUA DE LOS HOMBRES DEL AGUA 
(CHIPAYA, OR THE LANGUAGE OF THE WATER MEN)

Author: Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino

Publisher: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
Website: http://www.pucp.edu.pe/publicaciones/
Publication year: 2006
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9972-42-771-4
Pages: 309
Price: US $24.00 (shipping and handling included)

Description:

This book offers, for the first time, a complete linguistic description of the Chipaya language. Still spoken in its Oruro stronghold of Santa Ana in Chipaya (Bolivia), this language is the last surviving variety of the ancient Uro linguistic family, whose speakers settled along the waterways of the Poopó River and Lake Titicaca, on both sides of the Peruvian-Bolivian border. Considered by Alfred Métraux in the 1930s to be in danger of imminent extinction, Chipaya has managed to reverse that prediction.  In an unprecedented case in the linguistic history of the Andean world, it has remained vigorous to the present day, and freed itself from the subjugation of the Aymara language, thanks to the loyalty of its speakers.

	After situating the language within its historico-cultural context, this volume offers a general description of the structural components of the language at the phonological, morphological and syntactic levels, without losing sight of the effects of the Aymara influence on it. This description has the advantage of clearly projecting the linguistic features of the Chipaya language, emphasizing the unique characteristics that distinguish it from its neighbor languages (Quechua and Aymara). Thus, this book tries to fill the enormous gap long felt by social scientists of the Andean territory in general, and by experts in Amerindian linguistics in particular.


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Serafín M. Coronel-Molina
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
Languages and Cultures
401 East Pyne Building
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544