Cofán or Kofán, known in the language itself as Aingae, is the primary language of the Cofán people, an indigenous group whose ancestral territory lies at the interface between the Andean foothills and Amazonia in the northeast of Ecuador (Sucumbíos province) and southern Colombia (Putumayo and Nariño provinces), who call themselves the Ai. Although still robustly learned by children in Ecuadorian communities, Cofán is considered an 'endangered' language with estimates of around 1,500 native speakers.
Classification While past classifications have identified Cofán as belonging to linguistic families such as Chibchan or Andean B,Greenberg. Joseph H. (1960), The general classification of Central and South American languages. In: Anthony Wallace ed., Men and cultures: Selected papers of the 5th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (1956). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 791-794. it is now widely agreed to be a language isolate, with no known genetic relatives.Adelaar, Willem F.H. with Pieter C. Muysken (2004), The languages of the Andes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 454."Las construcciones relativas 'superlibres' en lenguas mayas ['Super-free' relative constructions in Mayan languages]" -- AnderBois, Scott, Miguel Oscar Chan Dzul, Jessica Coon, Juan Jesús Vázquez Álvarez, Conference on Indigenous Languages of South America (CILLA) IX, The University of Texas at Austin.
History and current status Aingae is a language isolate of Amazonia spoken by the Cofán people in Sucumbios Province in northeastern Ecuador and the departments of Putumayo and Nariño in southern Colombia. The language has approximately 1500 speakers and is relatively vital in Ecuador and severely endangered in Colombia. However, language attitudes about Aingae are positive and it is considered foundational to Cofán identity and community (Cepek 2012).
The Ai are traditionally hunter-gatherers who historically spanned over a large territory (AnderBois et al. 2019). In Ecuador, the Cofán have resisted conquest by the Inca and colonization by the Spanish, as well as anti-indigenous policies by the Ecuadorian government. The pre-Columbian Cofán population is estimated at 60,000 to 70,000. Though the origin of the Cofán is the Eastern Andean Cordilleras, Inca encroachment pushed the Cofán to the eastern lowlands, which they still inhabit today. The Cofán have undergone de facto segregation codified by the Ecuadorian government, a measles outbreak in 1923 that reduced the population to a few hundred, and illegal oil extraction that threatened the environment in Cofán territory and the Cofán way of life. The Cofán have played a major role in the Indigenous movement in Ecuador, and in 2018 they won a judicial case recognizing their right to decide over environmental activities in their territory and prohibiting the continued operation of mining activities.
The Cofán's religious tradition is shamanistic, and a key cultural value of the Cofán is harmonious conviviality. In addition, participation in cultural practices such as drinking yaje and traditional skills like hunting and housebuilding, rather than descent or ethnicity, plays a large role in determining one's status as an ai (Cepek 2012). The Cofán credit their strong linguistic identity for their ability to withstand colonial oppression and protect their traditional way of life.
Aingae is a language isolate. The language has considerable Amazonian borrowings from Tukanoan and Cariban languages, as well as many Quechuan borrowings. While there have been previous claims of genetic ties or language contact of Aingae to Barbacoan, Chicham, and Chibchan, it has been determined that there are no substantial borrowings. No complete grammar of the language has been produced.
The name of the language, , which consists of the stem ('person, Cofán person, civilized person') and the manner clitic , means 'in the manner of the people'. Though the speakers use the word , the language is also known by the Spanish denomination .
Phonology Aingae has 27 consonants as well as 5 oral monophthongs and 6 oral diphthongs, each with a nasal counterpart which is contrastive. The language is currently considered to have an unknown amount of dialectal variation. It is quite likely that there is some, but no concrete research and evidence has been put forward to make a strong claim either way, warranting further investigation.
Consonants The 27 consonant phonemes are listed below in the table with their IPA representations. In Aingae, there is a three-way, contrastive distinction between voiceless, aspirated, and prenasalized plosives and affricates. There are no such distinctions for fricatives. All consonants can be word-initial, except for /ʔ/ and /ɰ/. Note that glottal stop, although phonologically contrastive, can be realized as creakiness.
Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal Plosive/Affricate Fricative Nasal Approximant Tap
Vowels The 5 oral vowels and their nasal counterparts are listed in the table below with their IPA representation. The 6 diphthongs and their nasal counterparts in IPA representation are the following: [ai]/[ãĩ], [oe]/[õẽ], [oa]/[õã], [oi]/[õĩ], [ɨi]/[ɨ̃ĩ], and [ao]/[ãõ].
FrontCentralBackHigh / / Mid / / Low /
Diphthongs When vowels appear adjacent to one another, they either become a diphthong (for the pairs listed above) or a glide is inserted if a diphthong does not exist for that pair. For example:
Note that the vowel pair /ae/ is realized as [ai].
Triphthongs do not exist in Aingae, and glottal stops are inserted phonemically when a sequence of three vowels would occur as in example (1) below.
Nasalization Nasalization is a major feature of the Aingae sound system. As already seen, there are contrastive prenasalized consonants as well as contrastive nasal counterparts to all monophthongs and diphthongs. Example (4) below demonstrates their contrasting nature:
(4a) /hi/ [hi] (4b) /hĩ/ [hĩ]
Along with being contrastive, nasalization also plays a key phonological role in the surface realization of morphemes, working both backwards and forwards. The consonants /p/, /t/, /ʋ/, and /j/ all become nasalized when following a nasal vowel, becoming /ᵐb/, /ⁿd/, /m/, and /ɲ/, respectively, as in examples (5) and (6).
(5a) /ha-pa/ [ha.pa] (go-) (5b) /hẽ-pa/ [hẽ.ᵐba] (sound-) (6a) /hi-ʔja/ [hiʔ.ja] (come-) (6b) /hĩ-ʔja/ [hĩʔ.ɲã] (exist-)
Note that nasalization of vowels can cross consonant boundaries when the vowels are separated by a glottal fricative /h/ or glottal stop /ʔ/ (even when a glide is present) as in example (*) above and example (7) below:
(7a) /tsɨi-ʔhe/ [tsɨiʔ.he] (walk-) (7b) /tsõ-ʔhe/ [tsõʔ.hẽ] (do-)
Additionally, oral vowels become nasalized when preceding prenasalized consonants and when following nasal consonants.
(8) /dɨ.ʃo.ⁿde.kʰɨ/ [dɨ.ʃõ.ⁿde.kʰɨ] (child=.) (9) /ɲoɲa.pa/ [ɲõɲã.ᵐba] (make=)
They also become nasalized when either preceded or followed by a nasal vowel, as in examples (10) and (11).
(10) /ho.ʋaʔ.kã.o/ [ho.ʋaʔ.kãõ] (==)
Syllable structure Aingae syllable structure is (C)V(ʔ), with many variations thereof. At minimum a syllable can be a singular vowel and at maximum can be consonant onset with a diphthong nucleus and glottal stop coda. Note that vowel length is not a relevant feature in syllable structure. A complete list of the structures allowed is given in the table below with examples for each.
VVVCVCVVVʔVVʔCVʔCVVʔ
Prosody Generally speaking, in the absence of a glottal stop, stress in Aingae is found on the penultimate syllable as in examples (12a) and (12b). When a glottal stop is present however, stress is found on the syllable with the second mora before the glottal stop (Dąbkowski, 2020), compare examples (13a) and (13b). This is a stress pattern that is currently cross-linguistically unattested.
(12a) [ˈfe.tʰa] 'open' (12b) [fe.ˈtʰa.hi] 'open-' (13a) [ˈfe.tʰa.ʔhe] 'open-' (13b) [fɨn.ˈdɨi.ʔhe] 'sweep-'
Stress can in some cases be contrastive, compare (14a) and (14b). (14a) [ˈnẽ.pi] (14b) [nẽ.ˈpi]
Writing system Aingae has two principal orthographies, both using the Latin alphabet. The first was developed by missionaries Marlytte and Roberta Borman, and first employed in M. Borman (1962). This orthography was influenced by Spanish and thus contained some needless complexity such as representing the phoneme /k/ with before front vowels, and with elsewhere. Borman also conveyed aspirated obstruents via reduplication instead of via <h> insertion like in the modern orthography. More recently, the Cofán community has created and widely adopted a new writing system which aimed to solve some of the opacities of Borman's script. A comparison between the two orthographies can be observed in the tables below:
+Consonants IPA Borman Community IPA Borman Community /p/ p /ⁿdz/ ndz, dz /pʰ/ pp ph /ⁿdʒ/ndy, dy /t/ t /f/ f /tʰ/ tt th /s/ s /k/ c, qu k /ʃ/ sh /kʰ/ cc, qqu kh /h/ j /ʔ/ /m/ m /ts/ ts /n/ n /tsʰ/ tss tsh /ɲ/ ñ /tʃ/ ch /ɾ/ r /tʃʰ/ cch chh /ʋ/ v /ᵐb/ mb, b /j/ y /ⁿd/ nd, d /ɰ/ g /ᵑɡ/ ng, g
+VowelsIPA Borman CommunityIPA Borman Community/a/a/ã/an, a/e/e/ẽ/en, e/i/i/ĩ/in, i/o/ou/õ/on, oun, u/ɨ/uû/ɨ̃/un, uûn, û
Morphology Morphology in Aingae consists of stems, clitics, and suffixes. Free stems include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbials, and meteorological stems (such as words for "wind", "rain", and "sun").
While many stems are free, there are also a number of bound stems, which typically express states of being or properties, and are in a class of "flexible stems" by themselves. In the following sentence, bia "long" is one of these bound stems.
Beyond stems, Aingae has both bound suffixes and clitics, specifically enclitics that appear after the stem. There are no known prefixes or proclitics. In glossed content, suffixes are typically notated with a hyphen, and clitics are notated with an equal sign. The language has a very rich inventory of clitics, that can appear either at sentence level or constituent level. Sentence-level clitics occur at second position, meaning they attach to the end of the first word in a sentence, and mark qualities such as subject and sentence type.
Constituent-level clitics can either attach to the noun phrase or subordinate clause, or to the predicate clause. Clitics in the noun phrase occur in a fixed order, and can mark case, negation, and other grammatical features.
Suffixes also mark certain grammatical features. Some example include sentential type/mood, nominalization, and aspect. Passive, causative, and shape features are also indicated with suffixes.
Also present in the language is the process of reduplication, which expresses iterative aspect.
Inflectional template Clitics and suffixes in the language have a relatively fixed order of how they will attach to a verb or predicate phrase.
+ Inflection template of the Aingae verb causative () reciprocal () passive () aspect associated motion subject number () reality () polarity () rowspan="3" subordinate cosubordinate matrix information structure sentence-level subject person
Pronouns +Personal pronounsSingularPlural1st personña "I, my"ingi "we, our"2nd personke "you, your"ke'i "you all, your"3rd persontise "he/she/it, his/her/its"tisepa "they, their" +Second person subject clitics1st person=ngi2nd person=ki3rd person=tsû
Syntax Constituent order in matrix clauses in Aingae is relatively flexible, with SOV (or SO-predicate) considered basic. In embedded clauses, word order is more rigidly SOV/SOPred. Clauses must minimally consist of a predicate.
Subordinate clauses are strictly predicate-final.
Case and alignment Case markers are constituent-level clitics.
The full list of case markers is shown below.
ACC1accusative 1ACC2accusative 2BENbenefactiveINSTinstrumentLIMlimitativeLOClocativeMANNmanner, pathABLablativeDATdativeELATelative