History and Language of the Nɨkak
Authors:   , Mahecha Dany 
Published: October 2024

This thesis presents an analysis of historical and sociolinguistic aspects related to the way the Nɨkak population and territory were configured. It also presents the first grammatical description of the Nɨkak language (Kakua-Nukak family), spoken by about 940 people, inhabitants of the department of Guaviare in the Colombian Amazon.

In Part I we address the ethnography of the Nɨkak after their encounter with Western society in a very dynamic colonization frontier with the presence of armed groups that are part of the Colombian conflict. Here we also describe the changes that have affected the vitality of the Nɨkak language, since although it continues to be transmitted through the three generations (from grandparents to parents and newborns) the expansion of Spanish-Nɨkak bilingualism among the younger generations continues to increase, and the use of Spanish as a second language in all domains of use.

This section analyzes the historical events that originated the Nɨkak people, using sources of oral tradition and ethnohistorical and linguistic data. This study shows that the initial core of the Nɨkak population was composed of people from different groups: the Tsáse (Piapoco) and the Achagua (of Arawak affiliation), as well as some Guahibo and Sáliba. This encounter is well reflected in the structure of the current language, as shown here. The results confirm that the Nɨkak language shares grammatical and lexical elements with the Kakua language, but also with the Arawak languages, a common lexical component with Wánsöhöt (Puinave), and a minor influence of the lexicon of the Eastern Tukano languages, due to the migration of the ancestors of the Nɨkak from the Lower Vaupés to the Guaviare River.

In Part II, we present a phonological analysis of Nɨkak, describing consonantal and vowel phonemes. We argue that nasality is a suprasegmental feature affecting the morpheme and that the most prominent syllable structure is the CVC. The prosodic features of Nɨkak are characterized by the realization of three contrastive tones (rising, falling, and lower) within the domain of the monomorphemic lexicon in monosyllables.

Part III presents the syntactic classes and clausal constituents, nominal bases, pronouns and demonstratives, as well as the characteristics of nominal classification. This language has a less agglutinative nominal morphology than verbal, so that many nominals can occur without additional morphology, in contrast to verbal bases which have a wide repertoire of morphemes expressing notions of tense, aspect, mood, modality, and evidentiality. In terms of syntactic alignment in the clause, the grammatical relations are of a nominative-accusative type, and the order of constituents is dominated by SVO.

On the other hand, it is argued that the Nɨkak pronominal inventory has no free third person pronouns and that gender is encoded with demonstratives, so it is typologically considered a two-person language, in which demonstratives cover the functions of third person pronouns.

Finally, the Nɨkak nominal classificatory system is presented, which consists of a set of compound nominal constituents with class features with the position N2 referring to body parts, plants, types of substances and materials, forms and other classifications of entities or objects. However, a small set of these have nominal classifier functions, such as, anaphoric.

In summary, this research contributes to the knowledge of the history and language of this people, clarifies the reasons for their isolation and helps to understand their strategies of reconfiguration of ethnic identity, language and territory to increase the chances of survival.