Historical phonology of Mataguayan

Andrey Nikulin; Javier Carol

Forthcoming: Historical phonology of Mataguayan

Andrey Nikulin Javier Carol

Synopsis

This book discusses the phonological history of Mataguayan, a language family that includes no less than four distinct languages – Maká, Nivaĉle, Chorote, and Wichí – spoken by ca. 65.000 individuals in the Southern Chaco region in Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia. The book starts by offering a phonological reconstruction of Proto-Mataguayan, with separate chapters dedicated to its consonants, vowels, word-level prosody, and morphophonological alternations. This is followed by an outline of the phonological evolution of each Mataguayan language all the way from Proto-Mataguayan to contemporary lects, with a special attention to the dialectal diversity of Nivaĉle, Chorote, and Wichí. The study concludes with an etymological dictionary of Mataguayan, where known cognate sets are accompanied by comments on phonetic irregularities, semantic shifts, possible cognates in the neighbouring Guaicuruan family, and references to earlier studies.

Biographies

Andrey Nikulin

Andrey Nikulin is a faculty member at Núcleo Takinahakỹ de Formação Superior Indígena (Federal University of Goiás, Brazil). His 2020 University of Brasília dissertation on the reconstruction of Proto-Macro-Jê was selected for honorable mention for the SSILA Mary R. Haas Book Award. His research interests lie in historical linguistics, phonology, and morphosyntax of the languages of the South American lowlands, especially those of the Macro-Jê, Tupian, and Bororoan families. He has carried out linguistic fieldwork with speakers of Chiquitano (Macro-Jê) and Wayuunaiki (Arawakan).

Javier Carol

Javier Carol is an Associate Researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Argentina. He obtained his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Buenos Aires with a dissertation on the phonology and morphosyntax of Iyojwa’aja’ (Mataguayan). His research focuses on description and documentation of languages of the Chacoan region, especially Chorote/Manjui and the Mataguayan family in general. He has also worked on topics such as language contact between Spanish and indigenous languages and diachronic linguistics.