The Yagua language is spoken by the Yagua people, primarily in northeastern Peru

Peru

Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....

. As of 2005, it appears that a few speakers may have migrated northward across the Peruvian-Colombia

Colombia

Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...

n border near the town of Leticia. A third of the population is monolingual, and Yagua is the language of instruction in local primary schools.

Name

The exonym is spelled Yagua, Yawa, Yahua, Llagua, Yava, Yegua. They also go by Nijyamïï Nikyejaada.

Genetic affiliation

The Yagua language is a member of the Peba–Yaguan language family.

Sociolinguistic Situation

The most recently available estimates, dating from the 1980s, are that there are about 3,000 to 4,000 speakers of the language. At that time, a majority of Yagua

Yagua

The Yagua are a people in northeastern Peru numbering approximately 3,000 to 4,000. Currently, they live near the Amazon, Napo, Putumayo and Yavari Rivers and their tributaries. Ethnographic descriptions of the Yagua are found in Fejos and P. Powlison . The history and migrations of the Yagua...

 individuals were bilingual in both Spanish and the Yagua language. A few distant communities were still largely monolingual, and children were learning the language, though in at least some communities there was parental pressure on children to just speak Spanish. Some ethnic Yaguas are monolingual in Spanish.

Phonology

Yagua has 6 vowels and 11 consonants, as shown in the chart below. (Orthographic symbols in bold, IPA values in square brackets.)

Vowels

	Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...	Central Central vowel A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a central vowel is that the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel...	Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...
Close Close vowel A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the...	i [i]	ɨ [ɨ]	u [u]
Mid Mid vowel A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel...	e [e]		o [ɔ]
Open Open vowel An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue...		a [a]

• Some vowels show a significant degree of allophonic variation, notably /u/ which can be [u] or [o], and /a/, which can be [a] or [æ].
• Vowels are both oral and nasal.

Consonants

	Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...	Alveolar	Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...	Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....	Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...	m [m]	n [n]
Plosive	p [p]	t [t]	č [tʃ]	k [k]
Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...		s [s]			h [h]
Tap		r [ɾ]
Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no...	w [w]		y [j]

1. A nasal consonant preceding a nasal vowel is a simple nasal sound ( [m], [n]); but a nasal consonant preceding an oral vowel has an oral release ([mb], [nd])
2. All phones except for /s/, /č/, and /y/ may be palatalized. In addition, bilabial stops may be labialized.
3. /s/ and /č/ show significant allophonic variation, being either pre-stopped or not. Thus /s/ ranges from /s/ ~ /ts/, and /č/ ranges from /č/ ~ /š/.
4. The rhotic r is often retroflex
   Retroflex consonant
   A retroflex consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants, especially in Indology...
   
    ([ɽ]) and may have some laterality ([ɺ]); simple taps ([ɾ]) are also heard. /r/ can also be realized as /d/, especially when palatalized.
5. /w/ can be realized as /β/, especially when palatalized.
6. Within a word, there is metathesis of any morpheme-final /y/ with the onset of the following syllable

The language has either tone or a complex pitch-accent system, but this has never been adequately described.

Morphology

The language is highly agglutinative

Agglutinative language

An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view...

, such that most words consist of multiple morpheme

Morpheme

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...

s, and a single word may contain more than one root.

Syntax

Most Yagua sentences begin with the verb, followed by the subject and object in that order (VSO). It is a "double object" language, with no known syntactic differences between the two objects of verbs like 'give', for example, or applied objects.

The language has numerous postpositions (and no prepositions, which is generally unexpected for VSO languages). There are over 40 noun classifiers, and essentially no "adjectives". Nouns are modified either by nouns, by classifiers, or by other suffixes.

The language is documented in various works by Paul Powlison, Esther Powlison, Doris L. Payne, and Thomas E. Payne.

Vocabulary

Yagua has a quinary

Quinary

Quinary is a numeral system with five as the base. A possible origination of a quinary system is that there are five fingers on either hand. The base five is stated from 0-4...

 (base 5) counting system. Different numbers are used for inanimate objects/counting and animate objects (see measure word

Measure word

In linguistics, measure words are words that are used in combination with a numeral to indicate an amount of some noun. They denote a unit or measurement and are used with nouns that are not countable. For instance, in English, is a mass noun and thus one cannot say *"three muds", but one can say...

).

#	Inanimate/Counting	Animate	#	Inanimate/Counting	Animate
1	tárakí	tíkí	6	tárakínihyátee	tíkinihyátee
2	dárahúy	dánuhúy	7	dárahúnihyátee	dánuhunihyátee
3	múmurí	múuváy	8	múmurínihyátee	múúványihyátee
4	dáryahúyu	dányuhúyu	9	dáryahúyunihyátee	dányuhúyunihyátee
5	tádahyó	tádahyó	10	βuyahúy	βuyahúy

External links

• Yagua language dictionary online from IDS (select simple or advanced browsing)
• Rosetta Project - http://www.rosettaproject.org