TOWARDS A TYPOLOGICAL PROFILE OF THE ANDEAN LANGUAGES

Abstract

In recent years, important progress has been made toward establishing genealogical connections between the Amerindian languages and language families of South America (e.g. Rodrigues 2000). Nevertheless, extreme genealogical diversity is still found among the Amerindian languages spoken along the western fringes of the Amazonian region and in the open areas of South America's southern cone. These areas are adjacent or close to the Andean region where genealogical linguistic diversity, though hollowed out by historical events of the past five centuries, remains as intractable as ever. As a result, the center of gravity of the genealogical linguistic diversity in South America has shifted from the east to the west. Lack of progress in solving the genealogical puzzle of the South American languages has stimulated researchers to look for typological connections between the Amerindian languages of the subcontinent with the eventual goal to establish typological areas. From the point of view of linguistic typology, however, the diversity that is found in South America is hardly less formidable than from a genealogical point of view. And again, the east and center of the subcontinent seem to offer more possibilities to establish linguistic areas than the west. It has been a common practice among linguists working on South American languages to make an intuitive distinction between 'Amazonian' and 'Andean' languages on the assumption that there would be two different language types corresponding to these labels. Obviously, this distinction is largely fed by geographical and cultural considerations. If we exclude the southern tip of South America, where the situation is less clear-cut, there appears to be a wide cultural gap between peoples of the Andes and the Pacific coast, on one hand, and those of the Amazonian lowlands, on the other. The western societies tend to be more complex, with age-old sedentary habits and a highly diversified and technically well-developed agriculture. Some of these societies are counted among the great civilizations of the world, whereas for most of the eastern tribes this has never been the case. No matter which perspective one wishes to assume, cultures and languages situated at the border between the two general areas are