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The Andean-Amazonian interface: Sociolinguistic relations and
areal-typological patterns
Nicholas Q. Emlen
Rik van Gijn
Sietze Norder
28.1 Introduction1
The Andes is the longest terrestrial mountain chain in the world, extending around 7,000
kilometers from Colombia and Venezuela in the north to Tierra del Fuego in the south.
However, it is also exceedingly narrow: in some places, the Pacific Ocean and the Amazon
lowlands are less than 300 kilometers apart, as the crow flies. In those places, it is possible to
travel in a car from the ocean to the Amazonian lowlands, ascending among snowy peaks
above 5,000 meters, in a single day. The Andean chain thus compresses an extraordinarily
diverse range of geographic and ecological zones, from deserts, forests, fertile valleys, and
high wind-swept plateaus, into a long and narrow strip running the length of Western South
America.
Given these facts, it is no surprise that Western South American social networks have
sometimes extended beyond particular ecological and geographic zones. This is partly a
matter of mere proximity: people who live there are simply never far from a dramatically
different environment. However, it is also a question of capitalizing on the region’s ecological
diversity, which affords access to a broad range of resources that can be obtained through
interregional trade, discontinuous landholdings, and other kinds of arrangements. This has
brought people together both within and between the Central Andean highlands and the
Amazonian lowlands in various places and at various moments in history.
To be sure, such inter-elevational connections have varied in importance throughout
the centuries and millennia, and some social formations can be understood as generally
Andean or Amazonian phenomena without much reference to inter-regional connections. For
instance, the initial Quechuan and Aymaran expansions and the Inka Empire were all broadly
highland phenomena that involved Amazonia only to a relatively marginal degree, while none
of the major lowland language families extend very far into the Andes (see e.g. Heggarty
2020c). However, it is also true that at some moments throughout history, smaller-scale social
networks have spanned environments and mediated between speakers of various languages
across the highlands and the lowlands.
It is for this reason that a chapter about linguistic connections between the Central
Andes and Amazonia belongs in a book about the Central Andean languages. On the one
1
The authors thank Matthias Urban and Lev Michael for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this
manuscript. The research leading to these results received funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
(DFG, German Research Foundation) – project number UR 310/1-1 and from the European Research Council
(ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 818854
– SAPPHIRE).
Emlen, N.Q., van Gijn, R., and Norder, S., 2023. The Andean-Amazonian interface: Sociolinguistic relations and
areal-typological patterns. In Oxford Guide to the Languages of the Central Andes. Matthias Urban, ed. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
hand, any portrait of the Andean linguistic panorama must acknowledge, of course, the
Andean-ness of the major Andean civilizations and language expansions; but any sufficiently
nuanced account must also consider the many ways in which Central Andean life has been
interwoven with Western Amazonia at various moments throughout the millennia (note that
this is also true of the relationship between the Central Andes and the Pacific coast; see
Chapter 14 by Matthias Urban in this volume). Drawing attention to such connections goes
somewhat against the grain of scholarly and popular discourses about South America, which
have tended to consider the region’s indigenous languages and societies in the context of
distinct geographic and ecological zones (the coast, the Andes, and Amazonia). However, a
growing body of scholarly work suggests that there is much to be learned from looking at the
connections between those regions as well.2
In this chapter, we explore such Andean-Amazonian linguistic connections. We begin
at the broadest scale, in Section 28.2, by discussing areal typological linguistic patterns that
can be detected across Western South America (note that we refer to works throughout this
chapter that define the geographic scope of the Andean and Amazonian regions differently;
we address this definitional issue where it becomes relevant in each case). Such areal
typological patterns usually arise over long time scales as a result of language contact, and
thus reflect the deepest time depth available to our current methods. Next, we turn to the
linguistic geography of the Andean-Amazonian transitional zone, both historically and in the
present (Section 28.3); this represents a picture from the last several centuries. Finally,
Section 28.4 presents two case studies: the Aymara-Puquina-Leko-Takanan complex
northeast of Lake Titicaca during the Inka period, and the multilingual Matsigenka-Quechua-
Spanish frontier society of the Urubamba Valley in the 20th and 21st centuries. These case
studies explore the sociolinguistic dynamics of Andean-Amazonian linguistic interactions at
different time scales. Together, these three perspectives –the areal typology of Western South
America, the linguistic geography of the transitional zone, and the dynamics of two
multilingual social networks– illustrate the richness of Andean-Amazonian linguistic
connections and their importance for understanding the linguistic panorama of Western South
America.
28.2 The areal typology of Western South American languages

Areal-typological surveys of South American languages have asked to what extend the Andes
and Amazonia constitute linguistic areas. In this Section, we first present brief surveys of
areal-typological studies that focus either on the Andes (Section 28.2.1) or Amazonia (Section
28.2.2) (note that these regions are defined differently by various authors discussed in this
section). Then we move on to more recent studies which search for typological patterns in
South America as a whole without presupposing geographic parameters such as an Andean-
Amazonian division (Section 28.2.3). In the last section (Section 28.2.4), we present studies
2
For more on the discourse of Andean-Amazonian division and its history, see Santos-Granero (1985, 2002),
Orlove (1993), Radcliffe and Westwood (1996), Greene (2007), Steele and Zanotti (2014), and Hornborg (2020).
Ethnohistorical overviews of Andean-Amazonian relationships are given by Renard-Casevitz et at. (1988) and
Taylor (1999), and a recent historical compilation includes chapters from various disciplines (Pearce et al. 2020).
For ethnographic works about language between the Central Andes and Amazonia, see Babel (2018) and Emlen
(2020a).
2
that focus on western South America (western Amazonia and the Andes), to obtain a more
fine-grained view of the distributional patterns of the area. We finish that section with some
new findings of our own regarding the presence of individual linguistic features according to
geography (Section 28.2.4.1) and elevation (Section 28.2.4.2). The body of work discussed
here suggests that the areal-typological patterns that can be identified among the indigenous
languages of South America do not pick out internally coherent nor externally distinct Andean
and Amazonian linguistic areas, and rather that there is stronger evidence for a broad east-
west division in the continent (consistent with Krasnoukhova 2012 and Birchall 2014b), as
well as for more regionally specific patterns.
28.2.1 Andean areal studies

Areal-typological studies of the Andes generally justify their a priori geographical
delimitation by referring to a combination of geographic, cultural-archaeological, and
linguistic factors. In this view, the Andean region is characterized by its successive complex
societies and periods of broad pre-Columbian sociopolitical integration, of which the Inca
expansion is the largest and most recent (see Chapter 3 by Peter Kaulicke in this volume), in
an environment that is not dominated by river basins and tropical climates. The areal-
typological studies that we discuss in this subsection do not present a unified view of what
qualifies as an Andean language, but rather range from narrowly focused studies like
Büttner’s (1983) on the Central Andes, to much wider geographical extents, e.g. Adelaar’s
study (2008) on languages from Chile to Colombia. These can be seen in the second column
of Table 28.1 below, which lists the languages that have been considered in each study.
There are two main features of these studies that tend to determine whether their
authors conclude that the Andean region represents a linguistic area: (i) the sample of the
languages that they consider, and particularly whether this goes beyond the Quechuan and
Aymaran families (and beyond the Central Andes), and (ii) the methodological approaches
that they take. This is reflected in Table 28.1, which gives an overview of the studies
discussed in this section. With respect to the approaches, we divide them into three types:
bottom-up, naïve top-down, and informed top-down (see also Muysken et al. 2014). The
features in bottom-up studies emerge from the data themselves; naïve top-down studies
categorize the data according to a pre-generated feature list that was not based on areal
knowledge; and informed top-down studies use a feature list that was generated on the basis
of areal knowledge.3 The Andean areal studies are listed in Table 28.1.
3 We consider bottom-up approaches to be inherently naïve, although we acknowledge that there may be
differences with respect to how informed a researcher is when s/he starts sifting through the data. Likewise, areal
knowledge may be fed into a questionnaire based on more general principles. The distinctions we make in the
various approaches, therefore, are somewhat impressionistic.
3
Table 28.1 Andean areal studies
Study Languages considered Approach Areal features

Büttner Quechuan and Aymaran Bottom- • Lexical borrowing (especially
(1983) varieties, Kallawaya up between Quechuan and
Aymaran)
• Five-way place distinction in
stops
• Glottalized stops
• Aspirated stops
Dixon and Unspecified (focusing Informed • Synthetic morphology with
Aikhenvald on Quechuan and top-down some fusion
(1999) Aymaran; see • Typically 2-3 liquid phonemes
Aikhenvald 2007) • More fricatives than affricates
• Three-vowel system /u i a/
• No contrastive nasalization
• No classifier systems
• Large set of core and oblique
case markers
• Double marking for possession
• Two core arguments marked
on the verb
• Accusative alignment
• Non-isomorphism (but formal
overlap) between nominal and
verbal person paradigms
• No prefixes
• Verbal categories expressed by
obligatory suffixes
• Subordination does not involve
nominalization
• No nominal incorporation
• No incorporation of adverbs or
adpositions
• Full set of lexical numbers
Torero Quechuan and Aymaran Evaluating • Presence of /ñ/
(2002) varieties, Uru-Chipaya, a list of • Closed syllables
Mochica, Puquina, hand- • Decimal numeral system
Cholón, Atacameño, picked • Adjective-noun order
Huarpean, Mapudungun structural • Possessor-possessed order
features • Combination of determiner and
possessor (non-human)
4
• WH-initiality
• Neutralization of plurality
Adelaar Not explicitly Informed • Predominantly suffixing
(2008) mentioned, but a wide top-down • Case-marking
range of languages, • No prosodic nasality
including Quechuan, • No tone
Aymaran, Uru-Chipaya, • No complex vowel systems
Mochica, Puquina, • No nominal classifier systems
Cholón, Kallawaya, (other than numeral)
Chocoan, Barbacoan, • No gender
Jivaroan (Chicham)
• No stative-active systems
Huarpean, Chibchan,
• No well-developed ergativity
pre-Andine Arawakan,
Páez, Esmeraldeño,
Atacameño, Tehuelche,
and Mapudungun figure
at different points in the
discussion.
Van de Quechuan and Aymaran Naïve top- • Results are represented in
Kerke and varieties, Uru-Chipaya, down terms of linguistic distances,
Muysken Mochica, Puquina, without a discussion of the
(2014) Cholón, Kallawaya features that contribute most to
similarities between languages.
Urban Uru-Chipaya, Mochica, Informed • Lack of exclusively head-
(2019a) Puquina, and Cholón, in top-down marking languages
addition to Quechuan • The presence of several liquid
and Aymaran varieties consonants
• Lack of phonemic nasal
vowels
• Presence of elaborate numeral
systems
A general conclusion that is shared by the studies in Table 28.1 is that there is strong evidence
for intensive contact and typological convergence between the Quechuan and Aymaran
languages, but that as one adds more non-Quechuan and non-Aymaran Andean languages, the
areal signal becomes weaker, to the extent that the Andes as a linguistic area is called into
question. For instance, Torero (2002) hesitantly postulates an Andean linguistic area, but he
stresses that this area is based on only a handful of features, which are, furthermore,
sometimes dependent on each other or typologically quite common among the world’s
languages. He concludes that the putative Andean linguistic profile that is assumed by e.g.
Dixon and Aikhenvald (1999) is in fact a Quechuan-Aymaran profile. This overlooks the fact
that languages with rather different profiles have long been part of the Andean linguistic
5
landscape, and pre-existed the relatively recent expansions of the Quechuan and Aymaran
families. This conclusion is echoed in later studies such as Adelaar (2008), van de Kerke and
Muysken (2014), and Urban (2019a).
Adelaar (2008) concludes that, above all, there is a great deal of typological diversity
in the Andes, and that “[m]ost conceivable characterizations of Andean languages are
negative: Andean languages are predominantly suffixing case-marking languages, which have
no prosodic nasality, no tone, no complex vowel systems, no nominal classifier systems (other
than numeral), no gender (except for two language families), no stative-active systems and no
well-developed ergativity (except in one language family and in one language).” This
negative characterization highlights the fact that the Andean profile mainly seems to become
visible in contrast with the Amazon, since the absence of particular features contrasts with the
presence of those features in the Amazon. However, this presupposes that the Amazon is
linguistically coherent, which is not the case, as we show in Section 28.2.2. When considered
from a global perspective, the Andean absences are mostly quite common cross-linguistically.
The study by van de Kerke and Muysken (2014) stands out in the sense that it is the
only study that does not use a list of areally informed features, but rather an independently
developed list focused on noun phrase structure. Based on a calculation of the linguistic
distances between the structural profiles of the languages with respect to noun phrase
structure, they conclude that most languages in the Central Andes are clearly distinct from
each other, with the exception of the most similar Aymaran and Quechua varieties.
Urban (2019a) critically assesses a list of Central Andean features proposed by
Aikhenvald (2007).4 He concludes that most of the contact phenomena discussed by
Aikhenvald relate to the historical relations between Quechuan and Aymaran languages, and
overlook the many other languages of the broader Central Andean area. Urban notes that there
is evidence of contact between Quechuan and Aymaran languages and some of the smaller
languages like Uru, Chipaya, Mochica, Puquina, and Kallawaya, but that this does not amount
to convincing evidence for a Central Andean linguistic area which includes all of these
languages. Urban furthermore discusses some patterns which emerge from a close
interpretation of the sparse data available regarding the northern part of the Central Andes.
His analysis suggests typological similarities among now extinct languages in that region,
which partly converge toward the Quechuan-Aymaran prototype, and partly diverge from it.
To summarize this section about Andean areal studies, it is clear that the Aymaran and
Quechuan languages are typologically very similar (for more on the various views of this
complex history, see Chapter 26 by Nicholas Q. Emlen in this volume), and that some
elements of the shared Quechuan-Aymaran profile have also extended to other languages in
the region through local contact relationships. There is also evidence for local contact effects,
as well as some connections to the Quechuan-Aymaran profile, in the northern part of the
Central Andes. However, despite these patterns, when we broaden our areal-typological focus
beyond the Quechuan and Aymaran families to include other languages in the Andes, the
picture that emerges is one of notable typological diversity rather than commonality. This
weakens the case for both an Andean and a specifically Central Andean linguistic area.
4 Aikhenvald (2007) is a slightly adapted version of the Dixon & Aikhenvald (1999) list.
6
28.2.2 Amazonian areal studies

Amazonianists, for their part, have also engaged in areal-typological questions. Unlike the
Andean studies, which often explicitly emphasize sociopolitical complexity as a justification
for their geographic focus, the delimitation of the Amazonian area has rested more on
ecological than socio-historical factors. For instance, Derbyshire and Pullum (1986: 1) write
that Amazonia “constitutes a natural ecological subregion of lowland South America.
Throughout Amazonia, elevations are not great (under 1,600 masl) relative humidity is high
(usually over 80%), temperatures are fairly constant …, and rain falls on at least 130 days a
year.”5 Dixon and Aikhenvald (1999) delimit the Amazonian area on the basis of river basins,
defining it as the Amazon and Orinoco basins (though this runs into the problem that much of
the Andean highland region, and its languages, are in fact also within the Amazonian
watershed). Regarding their criteria for including languages in their survey, Dixon and
Aikhenvald (1999: 4) write that “if most of the languages in a family are spoken in the
Amazon/Orinoco Basin (e.g. Arawakan) then we cover that family. If most of the languages
in a family are outside the region (e.g. Guaicuru) then we do not deal with that family.” Note
that this definition excludes the Quechuan varieties spoken in the lowlands of Northern Peru
and Ecuador.
Dixon and Aikhenvald (1999: 7–8) also point to common cultural traits among
Amazonian peoples. These include the presence of canoes, hammocks, and pottery for
speakers of the larger rainforest-based language families, as well as largely pan-Amazonian
practices like female initiation rites (which are more common than male initiation rites) and
the existence of shamans who can cause and cure diseases by controlling spirits (though they
do not discuss such practices outside of Amazonia). There are also a few pan-Amazonian
lexical patterns like cognate or similar words for ‘jaguar’ and ‘dog,’ and the word kuku or
koko for ‘maternal uncle’ or ‘father-in-law’ (see Haynie et al. 2014, Pache et al. 2016, and
Zamponi 2020 for other studies on widespread lexical forms in Amazonia). However, Dixon
and Aikhenvald do not specify the geographical extent of these cultural patterns, whether they
should be interpreted as the result of shared histories, or how this relates to the differences
that exist between cultural behavior from one group to another. As Derbyshire and Pullum
(1986: 8) note, “we are of course speaking of hundreds of different groups with hundreds of
different cultural traditions.” Indeed, Epps (2020) argues for an Amazonian tradition in which
distinctness of the different groups was consciously maintained. In sum, the underlying
reasons for considering Amazonia to be an areal unit are more disparate and –for lack of
sufficient data– less embedded in a coherent historical tradition than is the case in the Central
Andes.
The Amazonian areal studies are listed in Table 28.2.
5
Note that we do not posit our own geographical definitions in this chapter, but rather discuss those used by
other authors.
7
Table 28.2 Amazonian areal studies
Sample Approach Shared features

Derbyshire 20 unspecified Naïve • Object-subject order
and Pullum languages bottom- • Verb agreement with both S and O
(1986) up • Pro-drop based on information
structure
• Nominalized subordinate clauses
• Orders NA, GenN, NP-P
• Lack of agentive passive
constructions
• No indirect speech constructions
• Clause juxtaposition for
coordination
• Right-dislocation (NP, Adv, PP)
• Extensive use of sentence-level
particles
• Ergative case marking
Derbyshire 30+ languages Informed • Object-initial order
(1987) (Arawakan, Cariban, bottom- • Orders NA, GenN, NP-P
Panoan, Tupian, Gean, up • Split alignment
Tacanan, Yanomani,
as well as a few
isolates)
Payne Unspecified, covering Naïve None, only features with either wider
(1990b) the wide range of bottom- or more narrow distributions.
languages in Payne up
(1990a)
Beier et al. Unspecified, but Naïve • Dialogicality (formalized discourse
(2002) seemingly a core and forms)
sample of 20–30 informed • Ceremonial greetings
languages, limited by bottom- • Ritual wailing
available material. up • Evidentiality
• Use of reported speech for emotional
and cognitive states and processes
• Parallelism (complete or partial
discourse repetitions)
• Discourse registers
Dixon and Unspecified, but Informed • Agglutinative and (poly)synthetic

Aikhenvald covering the linguistic bottom- morphology
(1999), families and some up • Head-marking
isolates spoken in the (contrast • Typically one liquid phoneme
8
Aikhenvald Amazon and Orinoco with • More affricates than fricatives

(2007, basins. Andes) • Five-member vowel system
2012) including high unrounded vowel
• Contrastive nasalization of vowels
• Gender or classifier systems with
unmarked head nouns
• Small set of oblique cases
• One core argument cross-referenced
on verb
• Prominence of split ergativity
• The existence of prefixes
• Small class of lexical numbers
Due to a lack of available data at the time, the early attempts at assessing linguistic
areality in Amazonia, Derbyshire and Pullum (1986) and Derbyshire (1987), were necessarily
tentative, and based on only a small number of languages across an enormous area. The goal
of these earlier studies, therefore, was not so much to propose a linguistic area, but rather to
start a discussion on areality in Amazonia. Moreover, Derbyshire and Pullum (1986) stress
that they cannot be certain about the historical processes that underlie these commonalities,
since they might be the result of contact, but might also be due to deep genealogical relations
that are still poorly understood. Nevertheless, these two studies establish a list of potential
features that have been used in many of the subsequent areal studies of Amazonia.
Payne (1990b: 3) is not optimistic on the question, noting that “[c]urrent linguistic
studies … fail to suggest that there is an ‘Amazonian’ linguistic area in the technical sense, as
distinct from the rest of South America, or even from Mesoamerica plus South America.” In
fact, many of the contributions in the volume which Payne (1990b) introduces highlight
typological diversity rather than unity, even within particular language families. Some
widespread features, such as the use of particles and discourse-based word order, do not seem
to be restricted to Amazonia; others seem to suggest smaller-scale areas. Interestingly for the
present chapter, Payne considers the possibility of a western Amazonian linguistic area along
the eastern slopes of the Andes from Bolivia to Venezuela. Evidence for this comes from
complex stress and pitch-accent systems, polysynthetic morphology with common verbal
categories like directional, locational, and positional morphology and variable affix order, and
nominalizing noun classification systems. Some of these characteristics set western Amazonia
apart from at least the Quechuan-Aymaran profile (pitch-accent, nominalizing noun
classification), although variable affix order (e.g. Muysken 1986b) and directional
morphology (Adelaar 2006b) have also been described for some Andean languages.
Moreover, some non-Quechuan and non-Aymaran Andean languages do have nominal
classification systems (Urban 2019a).
Dixon and Aikhenvald (1999: 9–10), more explicitly than any other study, highlight
contrasts in linguistic profiles between Amazonian and Andean linguistic areas. Almost all of
9
their Amazonian areal features contrast with what they characterize as Andean features.
However, these Andean features, as pointed out by Urban (2019a: 281) on the basis of a
footnote in Aikhenvald (2007: 192), are in fact best interpreted as Quechuan and Aymaran
features, since they are not representative for the Andes in a wider sense. In later work,
Aikhenvald (2012a: 72) furthermore contextualizes the conclusions about the Amazonian
features as proposed in Dixon and Aikhenvald (1999), clarifying that these “Amazonian traits
… are pervasive, but not universal.” Aikhenvald (2012a) also mentions a number of further
features with more limited geographical extensions within the Amazon, such as phonological
tone, evidentiality, complex classifier systems, and scattered languages with nominative-
accusative patterns. Some grammatical features are more common in Amazonia than
elsewhere, such as frustrative marking (Aikhenvald 2012a: 183–6) and sociative causatives
(Aikhenvald 2012a: 241). Taking these patterns into consideration, Aikhenvald (2012a: 70)
proposes to regard the Amazon as a “linguistic region,” which is a weaker version of a
linguistic area, characterized by “a smattering of shared features and a handful of shared
forms across the regions, found in languages which –as far as we know– have never been in
contact with each other.” As such, linguistic regions are not clearly connected to historically
known contact situations, but rather may be the result of various, now unrecoverable historical
events. Such a historical situation is discussed by Epps and Michael (2017), who review the
archaeological and ethnographic literature and observe the existence of large-scale trade and
ritual networks, sometimes spanning thousands of kilometers, which might have resulted in
such contact effects. Significantly for this chapter, Epps and Michael (2017: 950) note that
these trade networks were not confined to Amazonia, but rather “linked Amazonia to adjacent
regions, such as the Andes and Chaco.” Indeed, if we lower our requirements to the level of
the “linguistic region,” it is easy to find such smatterings across all the geographic sub-regions
of South America, and there seems to be no persuasive case for limiting it specifically to
Amazonia.
Beier et al. (2002) present a rather different areal approach, which focuses on shared
discourse practices, rather than linguistic features per se, in what they call “greater
Amazonia.” We take up their proposal here because they examine areal patterns in the cultural
dimensions of language use (i.e. discourse strategies), which underlie and might ultimately
give rise to the kinds of shared linguistic features identified by other authors. Indeed, some of
their proposals for shared discourse strategies are closely related to grammatical features (e.g.
evidentiality). One of the promises of this sort of approach is that it integrates anthropological
studies of South America with the areal-typological literature, and therefore allows for a
holistic, multi-disciplinary view of the continent. However, as the authors note, the sort of
detailed ethnographic and linguistic field data that are necessary for such a comparative
project are far more difficult to gather. For this reason, the coverage of languages in Beier et
al. (2002) differs from one trait to the next. Moreover, while recent areal-typological studies
have begun to control for universally preferred structures (e.g. Ranacher et al. 2021), which
could motivate independent developments in different languages, implementing such a
method in this case would be difficult. Nevertheless, the proposal is very promising, and if
more densely sampled follow-up studies reveal clearer patterns, it may cast a different view
on Amazonian areality and its sociocultural history.
10
At present, however, there seems to be no convincing case for Amazonia as a

linguistic area, strictly defined. To be sure, there are certainly shared linguistic patterns, but
they either have distributions that are clearly smaller than Amazonia, or they are also
characteristic of adjacent areas. As Payne (1990b: 3) recommended in a comment that is still
relevant today, “a search for areal features ... should either include all of South America, or
regions smaller than Amazonia proper.” In more recent contributions, both of these
suggestions have been taken up. We first discuss continent-wide approaches to areality (2.3),
and then studies that narrow their focus to the western part of South America (2.4).
28.2.3 Continental studies

A productive trend among areal typologists in the last decade has been to set aside pre-defined
geographical divisions like the Central Andes and Amazonia, and to instead take an
empirically-driven (naïve top-down) approach to see how particular patterns emerge within
the South American continent as a whole. These studies have not supported an Andean-
Amazonian areal division per se, but rather a broader east/west division in South America (in
which the western side includes both the Andes and Western Amazonia). The studies are
listed in Table 28.3.
Table 28.3 Continent-wide studies of South American feature distributions
Study Approach Western features (contrasting with east)

Krasnoukhova Naïve top- • pre-head position for all modifiers (head-finality)
(2012) down • absence of gender and/or classifiers
• nominal property words
• lack of inalienable nouns
Birchall (2014) Naïve top- • double marking of grammatical relations
down • person suffixes
• accusative case alignment
• indexing of R arguments in ditransitives
Chang and Naïve top- No explicit discussion of individual features on a
Michael (2014) down continent-wide scale
11
Krasnoukhova (2012) is a continent-wide account of noun phrase structure in South American

languages. It is based on a questionnaire designed to capture the diversity of noun phrases in
55 South American languages with respect to their syntax, morphology, and semantics.
Krasnoukhova carried out an analysis of the areal distribution of particular features, and
identified a broad east/west division as described above. This conclusion is corroborated by
Birchall (2014b), a more quantitatively oriented study which reviews patterns of argument
marking in South American languages and finds that a number of features follow the same
east/west distinction. In Birchall’s study, Western South America includes the North and
Central Andes (from Colombia to Bolivia), the southern Cone, and western Amazonia.
In addition, Birchall (2014b) confirms weak areality for Amazonia, as discussed in
Section 28.2.2. A number of features in his study, including some of the Amazonian/Andean
contrastive features proposed in Dixon and Aikhenvald (1999), are in fact not significantly
more common in Amazonia or the Andes when viewed in the context of a more extensive
sample. Other Amazonian features in Dixon and Aikhenvald’s list, such as ergativity, the
indexing of a single argument on the verb, and the use of person prefixes, appear not to be
areal features of Amazonia as a whole, but rather of sub-areas within Amazonia.
Chang and Michael (2014) is a continent-wide study of phoneme distribution. In their
approach, they test, for each pair of languages, a null hypothesis that a language inherits its
phonemes from an ancestor language against an alternative hypothesis that they have been
acquired through contact. Clusters of language pairs with high borrowing scores are found
dispersed over the continent in several pockets, confirming existing proposals for contact
areas like the Vaupés, Middle Putumayo, Upper Xingú, and the Southern Andes. They also
find several language pairs with high borrowing scores that span considerable differences in
elevation; these are found between the Northern Andes and adjacent northwest Amazon,
between the northern part of the Central Andes and the adjacent Marañón Valley, and
between the Southern Andes and adjacent lowland areas. Chang and Michael (2014) do not
discuss the particular phonemes that contribute to the high borrowing scores (they focus
instead on an Amazonian case study), but in a related study, which is discussed below in
Section 28.2.4., Michael et al. (2014) zoom in on the Andes and adjacent regions.
All three continental studies discussed here show clear connections between the Andes
and Amazonia, to the extent that some researchers (Krasnoukhova 2012; Birchall 2014b)
suggest that western South America, including both the Andes and western Amazonia, may be
regarded as a linguistic area. These conclusions, in combination with the weak areality of the
Amazon and, to a lesser extent, the Andes, call into question the empirical basis for dividing
South American languages into internally coherent and externally separate Andean and
Amazonian linguistic areas. These findings raise further questions about the internal areal-
typological structure of western South America. Such questions have been addressed in a
number of studies, discussed in the next section, which narrow their focus to the Upper
Amazon and the adjacent Central Andes (which we call Pan-Western South American
studies).
12
28.2.4 Pan-Western South American studies

A further set of studies zooms in on the western portion of the continent. These focus on the
Central Andes, the Northern Andes, and the adjacent eastern slopes and lowlands roughly as
far as western Brazil, and are summarized in Table 28.46
Table 28.4 Pan-Western South American studies of feature distributions
Study Approach Main conclusions

Van Gijn Informed top- • No clear clustering of lowland languages
(2014) down • Clear profile of the southern Central Andes
• A number of foothill and slope languages pattern more
with the central Andean languages
Van Gijn and Informed top- • Many so-called lowland features are in fact not
Muysken down restricted to the lowlands
(2020) • Many so-called highland features are in fact not
restricted to the highlands
Michael et al. Informed top- • Areal patterns extending from the Andes into the
(2014) down Amazon at several points
• Southern core of the Andes connected to Chaco and
Patagonia
Ranacher et al. Informed top- • Contact area in the south central Andes
(2021) down • Highland-lowland connections in northern
Peru/Ecuador and a few connections to languages in
central and south Peru
Van Gijn (2014b) looks at a sample of 30 languages spoken along the Central Andes
and the adjacent lowlands, between Ecuador in the north and Bolivia in the south. These
languages were coded for 23 typological features which have been proposed as contrastive for
the Andes and Amazonia by other authors (as outlined in Sections 28.2.1 and 28.2.2; note that
the geographic parameters of the regions vary by author, and that the Andean criteria mainly
correspond to the Quechuan-Aymaran languages). On the basis of these 23 features, distances
between languages were then calculated and compared to the proposed Amazonian and
Central Andean profiles defined by Dixon and Aikhenvald (1999). Van Gijn (2014b) draws
three main conclusions. First, there are in fact few languages that actually approximate the
purported Amazonian prototype. Second, a number of languages in the Amazonian lowlands
seem to be much closer to the proposed Andean typological profile than to the Amazonian
one (this is true, in particular, for the Tacanan languages Cavineña and Ese Ejja, and to a
lesser extent for Waorani, Secoya, Cofán, and Mosetenan). Third, there is a great deal of
diversity within the Upper Amazon area, though this diversity deviates from what the studies
6
Some typological studies have focused on smaller areas in the Andean-Amazonian transitional zone, including
Valenzuela’s (2015) work on the Cahuapanan family and Wise (2011). In this section, we limit our discussion to
broader, pan-Western South American studies.
13
described in Section 28.2.1 and 28.2.2 have identified as the Andean and Amazonian profiles.
Van Gijn and Muysken (2020), having considerably expanded the original 30-language
sample to 77, confirm these patterns. In addition, that study shows that many features which
are purportedly representative of the Andean group are also found far into the lowlands, and
some purportedly Amazonian features are found quite high up the slopes. This, again,
suggests close interaction and connection between the highlands and the lowlands.
The aforementioned study by Michael et al. (2014) zooms in on the so-called circum-
Andean area, i.e. the Andes and adjacent slopes. Based on a database of phoneme inventories,
they start from the assumption that the Andean languages form a contact area, which they call
the “Andean core.” In a second step, they apply a Naive Bayesian Classifier to determine
which features set the languages of the Andean core apart from the surrounding languages. In
addition, the technique identifies those languages outside the proposed core that are similar to
the languages inside the core, thus proposing candidates for a linguistic area. The authors
carry out two analyses –one in which the core spans the Andes between northern Chile and
northern Ecuador, and another in which there are two Andean cores– with the dividing line
running through the Andes of southern Peru. The single-core analysis reveals areal patterns
extending from the Andes down the eastern slopes at several points (Ecuador, along the
Huallaga River, the southern Peruvian Foothills, and into the Chaco and Patagonia). In the
two-core analysis, the Chaco and Patagonia are connected to the Southern Andes, while
Ecuador, the Huallaga River, and the southern Peruvian Foothills are connected to the
northern core. Like the other studies, this shows the permeability of the highlands and the
lowlands, as well as the importance of substructure in both the Upper Amazon and the Andes.
This latter point is also corroborated by a more recent proposal by Urban and Barbieri (2020)
that identifies an important linguistic and genetic distinction between the northern and
southern portions of the Central Andes, and by Urban (2019a, 2019b) and Urban et al. (2019).
In a recent study, Ranacher et al. (2021) take a different Bayesian approach to
identifying areality, which does not involve an a priori assumption of a core area. The study
features two case studies, one in the Balkans and one in western South America. In the
western South American study, random zones (sets of languages) are generated, and a
likelihood of shared history is calculated on the basis of those languages’ typological features
in each proposed zone, as compared to languages outside that zone. These features come from
an expanded version of the dataset used in Van Gijn (2014b) and Van Gijn and Muysken
(2020). Relative component contributions to these similarities by universal, genealogical, and
areal pressures are estimated, allowing for the isolation of effects in which contact played an
important role. This rigorous and systematic methodology identifies three distinct areas in
western South America, as well as strong indications of highland-lowland contact. A first
contact area consists of a dense network of languages in Ecuador and Northern Peru (these
include Barbacoan, Chicham, Kawapanan, and northern Quechua languages), and a few
connections to individual languages (Yanesha’, Amarakaeri, Araona) further south. This is
largely in agreement with the findings of Michael et al. (2014) discussed above. A second
area is more strictly Central Andean, and revolves around southern Peruvian Quechuan,
Aymaran, and Uru-Chipayan languages, and also includes Kallawaya. A third area stretches
over a large distance in the Amazon, with a tight cluster in northeastern Peru and far-flung
14
outliers in western Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. In concert with the other studies discussed
in this section, a picture emerges of internal substructure in the Upper Amazon (in line with
Epps’ 2020 identification of such patterns across Amazonia), which may stretch over
considerable elevation differences, again suggesting highland-lowland contact.
28.2.4.1 Geographical distribution of structural features

For the present contribution, we conducted a further analysis of structural features in western
South American languages to understand how those features pattern geographically. To this
end, we expanded the language sample and the feature list used in van Gijn and Muysken
(2020) to 155 languages and 36 features. The resulting dataset consisted of 30 binary
variables and six categorical variables. We used the general coefficient of similarity proposed
by Gower (1971) –generally referred to as “Gower’s distance”– to calculate (dis)similarities
between the 155 languages. We chose this approach to distance calculation because it is
suitable for mixed data (that is, data that comprises both categorical and binary variables).
Gower’s distances were calculated using the daisy function within the R package cluster
(Maechler et al. 2021). The resulting distance matrix was used as input for a cluster analysis.
We evaluated four alternative clustering methods (DIANA, PAM, CLARA, AGNES; see
Kaufman and Rousseeuw 2005) and assessed the optimal number of clusters (up to a
maximum of 6) using silhouette widths (Rousseeuw 1987). A silhouette value close to 1
indicates that languages are well clustered (i.e. assigned to the ‘correct’ cluster), while values
close to -1 indicate poor clustering performance. Subsequently, silhouette width is calculated
by averaging the silhouette value of each language in the dataset. The average silhouette
width provides a means for evaluating the optimal number of clusters across different
clustering algorithms (Rousseeuw 1987). Silhouette widths were calculated using the clValid
package in R (Brock et al. 2008). The calculated silhouette widths show that the four
clustering methods were comparable, and in all cases the optimal number of clusters was two
(of a tested two-six), except PAM, where the optimal number was three. Divisive cluster
analysis (DIANA) with two clusters yielded the best results (i.e. silhouette width closest to 1)
and is presented in Fig. 28.1a. Two clusters are roughly divided between west (including the
Andes) and east (including much of Amazonia). However, it is particularly striking that there
is a considerable area in which languages belonging to the western cluster extend well into the
lowlands, consistent with the studies discussed above.
Although the analysis suggests that two clusters is the optimal grouping, it is clear
from the positioning of individual languages that there is considerable internal complexity
within each cluster (Fig. 28.1a). For instance, in cluster 1, a relatively tight agglomeration can
be discerned in the bottom-right corner, which connects Quechuan and Aymaran languages to
Chipaya, Kallawaya, and, more distantly, Uru, Puquina, and Jebero. At the top of cluster 1, a
denser, Panoan-dominated group can be seen, also connected to Aguaruna and Achuar-
Shiwiar (Chicham), Cofán (isolate), Tsafiki (Barbacoan), and Araona (Takanan).7 In cluster 2,
more diffuse Tupian-centered (center left) and Arawakan-centered (bottom left) groups are
observable, each also associated with a number of languages from other families.
7
Takanan has been proposed to be genealogically connected to Panoan (Hammarström et al. 2020 and references
therein).
15
16
Fig. 28.1 155 South American languages grouped into two clusters. (a) All 155 languages plotted against the
first and second principal component. (b) Location of each language coloured by cluster; a broad east-west
division is clearly visible. To represent the location of each language we used geographic coordinates from the
Glottolog database (Hammarström et al. 2020).
28.2.4.2 Elevational distribution of structural features

The analysis we presented in Section 28.2.4.1 has to do with the geographic distribution of
linguistic features between the Andes and Amazonia. Our analysis demonstrates that areal
patterns in linguistic features fail to clearly define either an Andean or an Amazonian area,
which is consistent with continental studies from the last decade (Section 28.2.3) which use
sophisticated new methodologies and large typological datasets to examine dozens of
linguistic features across dozens or hundreds of languages.
A further question we might ask is how features that have been proposed as Andean
and Amazonian in the areal literature discussed in Sections 28.2.1 and 28.2.2 actually
17
correspond to those macro-geographical regions. A helpful proxy in this regard is elevation.

In order to address this question, we collected data for 36 features that are reported to be
common in (subareas of) Amazonia and the Andes (as defined geographically by the various
authors) for 166 languages across South America (see Figs. 28.1 and 28.2 for their
distributions). The features were taken from a variety of areal studies of both the Andes
(Büttner 1983; Constenla Umaña 1991; Dixon and Aikhenvald 1999; Torero 2002; Adelaar
2008) and the Amazon (Derbyshire and Pullum 1986; Derbyshire 1987; Payne 1990; Dixon
and Aikhenvald 1999; Payne 2001; Crevels and Van der Voort 2008) We obtained an
elevation for each language based on its geographic coordinates in the Glottolog database
(Hammarström et al. 2020) (note, however, that point data are a crude way to represent
language locations and elevational profiles; we come back to this point in Section 28.2.1).
For the purpose of highlighting features relevant to this discussion, we used a
significance test (p < 0.01) as a heuristic to identify features for which elevation had the least
predictive power. Table 28.5 serves as a legend for the features shown in Fig. 28.2 below.
Table 28.5 Grammatical features not significantly correlated with elevation (p > 0.01) as
depicted in Figure 2
Feature label in Description

Figure 2
affricates>fricatives More phonemic affricates than fricatives
kw The presence of phonemic /kw/
voice_fricatives The presence of a phonemic voiced-voiceless opposition in fricatives
back-mid-V The presence of a phonemic mid-high opposition in back vowels
ideophones The presence of a distinct ideophone word class
person_affixes_pos The presence of prefixed or procliticized person markers
clusivity The presence of an inclusive-exclusive distinction in the pronominal
paradigm
evidentials The presence of evidentiality distinctions marked on the verb
18
Fig. 28.2 The distribution of grammatical features not significantly correlated with elevation (p > 0.01).
See Table 5 for explanations of the graph labels.
19
When considered together, three broad scale patterns emerge from Fig. 2:
(i) Continental skewing

Some features are, in fact, skewed towards one value across the entire
continent: for instance, not having more affricates than fricatives and the
absence of voiced fricatives are common throughout the Andes and Amazonia.
(ii) Regional islands

Some features have one common value, but the opposite value occurs in
certain regions, encompassing both low and high elevations. This is the case of
the phoneme /kw/, the presence of a back mid vowel, and evidentials marked
on the verb (evidentials are in fact much more common in Western South
America –both in the Andes and the Amazon–, but they are often expressed
elsewhere in the clause, by means of clitics or particles).
(iii) No clear areal patterning

A third case is when the presence or absence of a particular feature are both
common, but the distribution is not predicted by elevation. This is the case for
ideophones, bound possessive person markers, and clusivity in independent
pronouns.
When considered in light of the patterns suggested in the more recent literature on
areal typology in South America, these findings are in agreement with an emerging consensus
that there does seem to be a clear typological profile shared by the Quechuan, Aymaran, and
to a lesser extent, Uru-Chipayan languages (covering much of the South-Central Andes), but
that the picture in Amazonia is much more diffuse. We also find that there is considerable
intertwining of highland and lowland linguistic features in the Upper Amazon. This raises the
question what types of sociohistorical dynamics underlie these patterns, which is addressed in
the remainder of this chapter.
28.3 Languages and people between the Andes and Amazonia

In Section 28.2, we reviewed the areal typological literature and presented new findings of
our own. We concluded that the Central Andes and Amazonia do not represent distinct
linguistic areas, and that there is substantial typological continuity between the languages of
the highlands and the lowlands. A further question we might now ask is how the speakers of
languages and language families themselves –looking beyond the typological patterns– are
distributed with respect to the highlands and the lowlands.
Indeed, if anywhere, this might seem like a promising place to find support for an
Andean-Amazonian division. If one looks at a linguistic map of indigenous South American
languages, one can almost discern the outlines of the Andes and Amazonia. This is because
languages of the Quechuan family extend across the Andes from Southern Colombia to the
north of Argentina, with important but, by comparison, relatively modest incursions into the
eastern tropical lowlands; the Aymaran family also expanded across a vast expanse of the
Peruvian and Bolivian highlands without much of a lasting Amazonian footprint until the
20
mid-20th century. Meanwhile, other language families, like Arawakan, are widespread in
Amazonia but have not moved much above the Andean foothills.
It is possible to conclude from this sort of rough, continental-level generalization that
the Andes and Amazonia indeed represent coherent and distinct linguistic worlds (e.g.
Heggarty 2020). However, such an interpretation rests on an incomplete consideration of the
evidence in two ways. First, it focuses almost exclusively on the maximal extent of a few
relatively recent linguistic expansions. If we look back a millennium, the Quechuan family
was not nearly as widespread as it is today, and a millennium before that, the Quechuan and
Aymaran families were probably just two minor language families among a mosaic of other
similarly small-scale families. That is, the presence of two nearly pan-Andean language
families is a relatively recent pattern, which is superimposed onto an older and far more
diverse patchwork of small language families and isolates, some of which straddle geographic
zones (e.g. Uru-Chipaya, Puquina, Mochica, Hibito-Cholón, Culli, Leko, and others), some of
which disappeared before documentation but which still leave a toponymic footprint on the
landscape; see Cerrón-Palomino (2016f) and Torero (1989) for some well-known cases, as
well as Urban (2021a). Notably, this sort of patchwork of small families and isolates is quite
similar to what we find in Western Amazonia. In this sense, when we look beyond the recent
major linguistic expansions, the Andean and Amazonian linguistic situations –both mosaics of
small-scale and highly genealogically diverse families and isolates– are not terribly different
(see also Urban 2021b).
Second, when one zooms in below the level of the continent to examine the linguistic
dynamics as they exist on the ground –instead of on the map– those dynamics are often
characterized by movement across elevations, and multilingualism among neighbors at
different elevations, rather than hard boundaries drawn at elevational contours (see Platt 2009
for an ethnographic description from Bolivia). This is the case for Puquina, for instance,
which was spoken from the shores of Lake Titicaca throughout the immediately adjacent
Amazonian foothills before the Inca period (see Section 28.4.2). To be sure, at some moments
there have indeed been hard boundaries between Andean and Amazonian social networks, but
we should be careful not to mistake these for somehow more natural arrangements to which
inter-elevational patterns are merely exceptional.
A telling historical example comes from the Pantahua (also written <Pantagua>)
ethnic group of the Huallaga Valley of Central Peru, which, as Santos-Granero (1985)
describes, functioned as a “hinge” population mediating between the Chupaychu ethnic group
of the Huánuco highlands and Amazonian peoples in the Inca and early colonial periods (the
Chupaychu probably spoke Quechua; it is difficult to know much about the Pantahua
language, but Taylor 1999: 205 identifies it as Arawakan). The Pantahua played their
mediating role from somewhat outside Inca control, but during the early colonial period, they
became Christianized and incorporated into the Andean sphere. As Santos-Granero (1985:34–
5) explains, this process of “Andeanization” –their removal from the un-Christianized,
uncontrolled Amazonian sphere, and into the Christian, colonized, Andean sphere– was how
European colonial control became consolidated here alongside the formation of a new pan-
Andean ethnic identity. Then, as the region was devastated by European diseases, a rupture
opened between the highlands of Huánuco and the adjacent lowlands (see also Santos-
21
Granero 2002), incorporating the descendants of the Pantahua definitively into the Andean
sphere. As Santos-Granero (1985: 10, our translation) writes, “with this, the ‘sociocultural
continuum’ that existed between the Andean and Amazonian worlds in the pre-Hispanic
period in the region was destroyed, and the ‘image’ of two opposing worlds was born”.8 Such
“sociocultural continua” have existed in different forms in various parts of the highland-
lowland transitional zone (e.g. Section 28.4 below).
One of the most interesting aspects of such Andean-Amazonian linkages is how they
are continually reshaped throughout history. For instance, Burchard (1974) reports that in the
1960s, in the very same Huallaga Valley transitional zone discussed by Santos-Granero for
the Inca and colonial periods, farmers from two communities –one at 3,300 meters, and the
other at 700 meters above sea level–engaged in a sustained relationship of reciprocal crop
exchange, mediated by coca. By the 1970s and 1980s, the valley’s coca production had been
coopted by the international cocaine trade (Morales 1989), which brought a wave of Quechua-
speaking highland labor migrants into the tropical lowlands; then, when that industry
collapsed in 1990s, the local economy and patterns of interregional integration in the valley
were transformed yet again (Kernaghan 2009). In other words, the history of the Huallaga
Valley presents itself not in the static, binary terms of highland-lowland division and
separateness, but rather as a constantly evolving corridor of interregional connection –and
occasionally, disconnection– that has involved different languages, ethnic groups, products,
and modes of interaction throughout history. Such cases are found up and down the Andean-
Amazonian transitional zone; two case studies are given in Section 28.4.
28.3.1 Some broad-scale patterns

According to the picture of Western South America that we have presented so far, a
straightforward geographic division between languages designated as Andean and Amazonian
is useful for understanding some phenomena (e.g. the initial Quechuan and Aymaran
expansions), but certainly does not capture the full range of the region’s linguistic dynamics.
This is particularly true when we narrow our scope from the very broadest and most
generalizing continent-wide view.
This is illustrated by the map in Fig. 28.3. Here, we indicated speakers of the
languages covered in Adelaar with Muysken’s The Languages of the Andes (2004) with red
dots, and the languages covered in Dixon and Aikhenvald’s The Amazonian Languages
(1999) with blue dots, according to the 2017 census (Instituto Nacional de Estadística e
Informática 2018). (Note that censuses are imperfect instruments for capturing social and
linguistic dynamics, but that they remain the only source of data available for capturing such
broad demographic patterns.) Each dot represents 10 speakers of 41 languages counted in the
census, and are distributed according to how Peruvians across 1873 districts identified their
8
The nearby Cholón language (now extinct) was spoken between the Marañón and the Upper Huallaga valleys.
Speakers of this language were apparently also intermediaries between the highlands and the lowlands, and fit
into a broader patchwork of inter-elevational social relationships (for a thorough recent overview of Cholón’s
position in the region, see Urban 2021a). Another example comes from the Quijos Valley of Northern Ecuador,
which was long described as an empty, unpopulated buffer zone between the Andes and Amazonia. Recent
archaeological work has shown that this intermediate region was in fact home to a much larger population before
the epidemics and dislocations of the colonial period, and that the land was used even more intensively during
that time than by the modern cattle industry since the 1950s (Loughlin et al. 2018).
22
first language in the census. Here, the red dots are generally contained within the Andean
highlands, while the blue dots are generally located within the Amazonian lowlands.
However, when we look more closely, it becomes clear that characterizing this linguistic
geography in terms of a “boundary” overlooks substantial overlap at the transitional zone
(note that we do not intend this discussion as a criticism of these volumes’ authors, who
indeed were charged with continent-level descriptions; one must divide South America
somewhere in such an endeavor).
23
24
Fig. 28.3 Dot density map of speakers of 41 native languages in Peru (each dot represents 10 speakers). Speakers
of the languages listed as Amazonian by Dixon and Aikhenvald (1999) are shown in blue, and speakers of the
languages listed as Andean by Adelaar with Muysken (2004), the seminal reference work for the Andean
languages, are shown in red.
A first observation to be made regarding Fig. 28.3 is that red dots representing
speakers of Andean languages project quite far into Amazonia (note that Dixon and
Aikhenvald 1999 treat the entire Quechuan family as Andean, so lowland Kichwa appears red
in the northern part of this map). A second observation is that languages identified as Andean
and Amazonian are interspersed in the foothills of Central Peru, as speakers of Quechuan
languages and Arawakan languages (in particular) have come to live side by side (see Section
28.4.1 below). Of course, these data give a snapshot of the region at the moment the census
was conducted in 2017 –in the midst of a great Andean exodus into the Amazon, as well as
urbanization in places across the country– and do not tell us much about earlier historical
periods. However, there is also no reason why the linguistic dynamics of other specific
moments should represent some truer or more natural state of affairs instead, as can be seen in
the other cases discussed in this chapter.
The complexities and continuities of the transitional zone can also be seen in the
elevational profiles of 20 indigenous Peruvian languages shown in Fig. 28.4, again based on
district-level 2017 census data.9 Some languages are indeed confined almost entirely to the
highlands –for instance, the bulk of Aymara speakers live above 3,700 meters in the Altiplano
of Southern Peru (and Bolivia and Chile, not pictured). Meanwhile, the speakers of other
languages, like Sharanahua, Nahua, and Ese Ejja, are indeed found almost entirely below
1,000 meters in the Amazon Plain. However, these patterns are less clear with some of the
other languages, including Quechua IIC, which is centered around 3,500 meters and extends
gradually to higher and lower elevations. Matsigenka, Asháninka, Nomatsigenga, and
Yanesha’, for their part, are also more evenly distributed across elevations than the other
languages Note that these visualizations of the 2017 census data also capture the massive
migratory wave of indigenous people to Lima and other parts of the Peruvian coast since the
mid-20th century, seen in these graphs as a long foot on the bottom left.
9
The Peruvian census simply lists “Quechua,” without specifying the Quechuan variety in question. We
assigned varieties here on the basis of the department or province in which the respondents lived. However, in
the Province of Lima, the target of most urban migration over the last several decades, we assigned Quechuan
varieties by the respondents’ place of birth.
25
Fig. 28.4 Elevational profiles of 20 indigenous Peruvian languages. The x-axis shows the percentage of speakers
at both sides of the water divide (note that the range of the x-axis differs between languages). The y-axis shows
the elevational range for bins of 100 meters. For each district, we distributed the total number of speakers of a
language evenly across elevation bins. Percentages were calculated as the number of speakers at each elevation
26
across all 1,873 districts in Peru, divided by the total number of speakers of that language. Data on the number of
speakers were obtained from the 2017 Peruvian census (Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática 2017),
boundaries of the Amazon basin were obtained from Mayorga et al. (2012). We used hole-filled Shuttle Radar
Topology Mission (SRTM) data from Jarvis et al. (2008) to calculate elevation bins (resolution is approximately
30 meters at the equator). The languages have the following population numbers: less than 500 speakers (Nahua,
Ese Ejja, Kakinte, Amahuaca), 500 – 1,000 speakers (Nomatsigenga, Quechua South Yauyos, Jaqaru Cauqui,
Yaminahua, Sharanahua, Harakmbut), 1000 – 10,000 speakers (Cashinahua, Yanesha, Yine, Matsigenka), and
more than 10,000 speakers (Shipibo-Conibo, Asháninka, Aymara, Quechua I, Quechua IIB, Quechua IIC).
Thus, while some of these languages are indeed found mostly at higher elevations, and others
mostly at lower elevations –and thus can quite justifiably be called Andean or Amazonian–
the broader pattern that we find across all of these languages is not one of binary geographic
division, but rather of continuity and overlap. That is, a line cannot be drawn at a particular
elevation that allows us to sort these languages to the highlands or the lowlands. So while the
binary labels “Andean” and “Amazonian” may be useful for locating some languages in the
geographic space of South America –particularly if one zooms out to the very widest
continental perspective– a more complete account also acknowledges that, at least in 2017,
the Andean and Amazonian linguistic panoramas were characterized by a great deal of
continuity and overlap.
One problem with traditional language maps in South America is that they usually
represent languages as internally homogenous and externally bounded blocks, sometimes
called choropleth maps (though sometimes blurred boundaries and overlapping shaded areas
are used to point to a more complex reality). By contrast, dot density maps allow us to capture
the linguistic geography of the transitional zone with greater nuance. Fig. 28.5 uses the same
2017 census data discussed above to show how the native languages of Southern Peru are
distributed (here, each language’s speaker population is represented by 1,000 dots, assigned
proportionally to the administrative districts in which those speakers live; languages with
fewer than 1,000 speakers are omitted.) What emerges from this picture is the complexity and
overlapping quality of Peru’s linguistic panorama. For instance, far from being contained by
elevation, we see that Quechua I and Quechua IIC each overlap substantially with the
Arawakan languages of the eastern slopes (especially Matsigenka, Asháninka, and Yanesha’);
those eastern slope languages overlap, in turn, with other Amazonian languages such as Yine
and Shipibo-Conibo, which predominate on the Amazon Plain. These languages, in other
words, are part of an network in which several overlapping languages extend seamlessly from
the highlands into the Amazon Plain. Note also the dense concentration of indigenous
languages in cities like Lima (on the central Peruvian coast), which has resulted from the last
several decades of urban migration, especially from the highlands.
27
Fig. 28.5 Native languages of Southern Peru. Each language’s speaker population is represented by 1,000 dots,
assigned proportionally to the administrative districts in which those speakers live. Note that more widely
distributed languages like Quechua I and Quechua IIC appear sparser on the map, while smaller languages tend
to be denser. Languages with fewer than 1,000 speakers are omitted.
28
28.4 Two Andean-Amazonian multilingual networks

In Section 28.2, we showed that areal-typological patterns between the Andes and Amazonia
tend to be gradual and continuous, and that those regions do not constitute internally coherent
and distinct linguistic areas (particularly when one looks beyond the relatively recent
Quechuan and Aymaran expansions). In Section 28.3, we showed that speaker populations of
Western South American languages often overlap across elevational contours, and are
connected by multilingual networks that stretch from the highlands to the Amazon Plain. On
this basis, we concluded that speaking of a simple, binary distinction between the linguistic
situations in the Central Andes and Amazonia, while useful in some respects, is inadequate to
capture the full complexity and richness of matters on the ground. In this section, we present
two case studies –the Lake Titicaca/lowlands connection before the Inca period, and the
Urubamba Valley in the 20th and 21st centuries– to consider what kinds of sociopolitical
arrangements are involved this kind of localized, inter-elevational patterning in areal typology
(Section 28.2) and linguistic geography (Section 28.3).
We chose these two case studies because they are well documented and because they
illustrate the issue at hand. However, we hasten to point out that many other such cases can be
identified up and down the long Andean-Amazonian transitional zone; and also that each
follows its own organization that emerges from its own particular historical circumstances.
One such case is the Huallaga Valley (discussed in Section 28.3), in which the middle-
elevation Pantahua (possibly speakers of an Arawakan language) mediated between the
Andean Chupaychu people of Huánuco and people in the Amazonian lowlands during the
Inka period. Another case that is better documented in the linguistic literature involves the
Yanesha’ language of the Arawakan family. Yanesha’ exhibits notable Quechuan influence,
particularly in the lexicon, which can be traced to both the local Yaru variety spoken in the
adjacent highlands and a variety that spread across the Central Andes during the Inca period
(Wise 1976; Adelaar 2006a). Notably, this Quechuan linguistic impact corresponds to
highland genetic influence among Yanesha’ speakers (Barbieri et al. 2014). Yanesha’ has also
undergone lexical borrowing from Panoan languages on the Amazonian side (Hornborg and
Eriksen 2011). These patterns attest to the role of Yanesha’ in mediating between the Andes
and the Amazon Plain in past centuries (Santos-Granero 1992). Many river valleys connecting
the highlands and the lowlands have undergone a similar sort of cyclical integration and
separation, though the particular circumstances vary substantially from place to place. In
some cases, one can chart the emergence, evolution, and dissolution of multilingual networks
within the context of changing socioeconomic circumstances of the Andean-Amazonian
interface, though in other cases the specific languages and peoples are unknown to us now.
Such relationships have left various types of linguistic contact effects in the languages that
survive, sometimes detectable later as areal typological patterns (Section 28.2), long after
those relationships have dissolved.
28.4.1. Matsigenka, Quechua, and Spanish in the Urubamba Valley, Peru (20th and 21st
centuries)
The Urubamba Valley of Southern Peru is one of the great river systems connecting the
Central Andean highlands and the adjacent Amazonian lowlands. It originates with ice melt
29
from the glaciers and snowcapped peaks that tower above the Southern Quechuan heartland,
then cuts a brief and dramatic descent past the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu, into the cloud
forests and humid coffee lands beyond, and finally into the Amazon Plain (where its waters
are still cold to the touch as it winds its way through the tropical forests).
Today, the Urubamba Valley is home to speakers of the Matsigenka language (of the
Arawakan family), who live along the tropical portion of the Urubamba River and its hilly
hinterlands, as well as Quechua-speaking agriculturalists, who have long inhabited the higher
reaches of the valley and have been steadily moving down its slopes into the tropical areas for
centuries (Emlen 2020a). Most people also speak Andean Spanish to some degree.
Toponymic evidence suggests that Matsigenka was once spoken at higher elevations than
today; intriguingly, a number of non-Matsigenka, non-Quechua toponyms in the Urubamba
Valley also suggest presence of another, unknown language before Matsigenka and Quechua
each arrived there within the last 500–1000 years (for more on this timeline, see Emlen
2020a: 84).
The social, economic, and linguistic dynamics of Andean-Amazonian interaction in
the Urubamba Valley have taken many forms throughout history. Some of these dynamics are
connected to the valley’s role as a major conduit for interregional trade. During the Inca
period, tropical crops and medicinal plants, animals, animal products (including bird feathers,
a prominent elite prestige item; see Wilkinson 2018), and other lowland goods were traded up
the valley in exchange for highland tools, textiles, and salt (Gade 1972; Camino 1977;
Rosengren 2004: 19–20). Beginning in the colonial period, an annual exchange fair was
conducted between highlanders and Yine river traders from further downriver, who also
captured Matsigenkas to trade as enslaved labor for the regional agricultural economy
(Menéndez Rúa 1948: 153; Zarzar and Roman 1983; Rosengren 1987: 40; Gow 1991). The
Urubamba Valley has continued to serve as a conduit for the movement of extractive and
agricultural products ever since, including rubber, cinchona bark, coca, and sugarcane during
the 19th and early 20th centuries; coffee, cacao, achiote, and fruit since the mid-20th century
(Fioravanti 1974); and beginning in the 21st century, also natural gas (Smith 2005) and
cocaine (Emlen 2020a). These trade relationships have been conducted in several languages,
most prominently Quechua (e.g. Marcoy 1873, passim) and, increasingly, Spanish.
While trade has indeed been an important modality of Andean-Amazonian interaction
in the Urubamba Valley, the demographic transformations brought by the expanding
agricultural and extractive economies have had a far more profound influence on the local
social and linguistic situation. To a large extent, this has been due to a particular condition
that has defined social relations in the valley throughout its history: the valley’s small and
dispersed local population has generally been inadequate to supply the labor required by its
industries, leading to the voluntary or forced migration of people from other places. For this
reason, the valley has long been home to multiethnic and multilinguistic labor forces that have
included local indigenous people (some of whom have been Matsigenka speakers) and
migrants from various parts of the Andes (and in the early 17th century, even enslaved
Africans; see Bowser 1974: 176; de Ocampo 1907[1610]: 240).10
10
Paradoxically, the valley’s history has also been defined by its isolation. Its dense forests and sheer slopes
have often provided an attractive refuge for fugitive Andeans within a short distance of the nearby population
30
Since the 1950s, a massive migratory wave from the rural Andes has brought tens of
thousands of Quechua-speaking highlanders into the valley, where they have settled in many
parts of the Urubamba Valley traditionally inhabited by Matsigenka people. By the mid-
1960s, the stream of highland migration to La Convención had reached such a frenzied pace
that only one third of the province’s population was born there (Fioravanti 1974: 59). This
influx, which is still ongoing today, has been driven by economic stagnation and climate
change in the rural highlands, by increased demand for the valley’s tropical agricultural
products, and by a deluge of investment in lowland infrastructural development (funded since
the 1990s by the massive Camisea natural gas project, which exploits gas fields sitting under
Matsigenka and other indigenous lands).
This situation has created a complex multiethnic and multilinguistic frontier society, in
which people from various backgrounds now speak Quechua, Matsigenka, and Spanish in
various combinations. The society is characterized in large part by conflict over land and
resources –ameliorated to some extent by the comunidades nativas ‘indigenous communities’
landholding law of the 1970s, by which indigenous Amazonians can defend their territories–
but it is also defined by relatively stable co-existence that has developed over the last several
decades within the burgeoning frontier society. This stability has been established, in part,
through a widespread pattern of interethnic marriage between Matsigenka women and
Quechua-speaking men (this particular configuration is due to the fact that most migrants to
the remote Andean frontier are young men, creating a notable gender imbalance in those
places; at this point, Matsigenka women in some places choose Andean men, whom they view
as having a higher status, as a rule rather than as an exception). Some Quechua-speaking men
bring their Matsigenka-speaking partners back up the valley with them, often as far as their
home communities or urban centers in the highlands; in other cases the men remain in the
lowlands with their new families (it is also very common for such unions to end, at which
point the children are simply incorporated into the Matsigenka communities). The result of
this dynamic has been a gendered flow of people and languages, with Matsigenka moving up
the valley with women, and Quechua moving down the valley with men (note that a similarly
gendered dynamic was apparently at play among Yanesha’ and Quechuan speakers in the
past, leading to male-biased Andean influence in the Yanesha’ genome; see Barbieri et al.
2014). Over the course of generations, this pattern has created countless multiethnic and
multilingual households, linked in active kinship networks that connect the remotest
Amazonian lowland settlements with far-flung rural communities in highlands (this
phenomenon is described in greater detail by Emlen 2017a, 2020a).
This pattern of widespread interethnic marriage and intimate, household-level
multilingualism has had a far greater impact on the linguistic situation than the sort of trade
relationships described above. Indeed, as more interethnic unions are generated by this
dynamic, more children are growing up in trilingual homes. In the early 2000s, such families
tended to use Quechua in contexts associated with the agrarian society and economy,
Matsigenka in the home, and Spanish in interactions related to the state and national culture of
centers. This was the case in the mid-16th century, when the Incas maintained a capital in exile and harassed the
Spanish occupiers for nearly 40 years (Hemming 1970); it remains true today, as one of South America’s largest
cocaine industries thrives in the very same forests, beyond the reach of the state but close enough to benefit from
the modern transportation network (Emlen 2020a: 231–3).
31
Peru (Emlen 2015), though a general shift toward Spanish is surely under way. At the same
time, members of this multilingual frontier society have introduced all manner of contact
effects into their speech (see Emlen 2020b for a description of these effects). At the level of
the lexicon, there is quite a bit of borrowing: Matsigenka contributes terms for local places,
flora, and fauna to Quechua and Spanish, Quechua supplies Matsigenka and Spanish with
vocabulary regarding agriculture and the cultural practices of the agrarian social world, and
Spanish terms relating to the Peruvian state and national culture are borrowed into Matsigenka
and Quechua. There are also a number of multi-directional phonological and morphosyntactic
influences among the three languages. For instance, the variety of Andean Spanish spoken in
the valley has undergone substantial substrate influence from Quechua (since long before its
arrival in the lowlands), which has affected the production of vowels, word order, and
semantic and pragmatic phenomena such as evidentiality and epistemic modality (see Escobar
2011 for a summary of such features). This is the variety of Spanish that Matsigenka speakers
acquire, and they also project their own phonological and grammatical patterns into it. For
example, a calque of a Matsigenka locative construction has become common in the local
variety of Spanish (Emlen 2020b); meanwhile, Spanish /l/ is pronounced as [ɾ], and many
consonant clusters are eliminated, features that are both consistent with Matsigenka
phonology and phonotactics. Matsigenka, for its part, also appears to have undergone a
reduction in its vowel inventory in the areas closest to the Andes, a process that has made its
phonology more typologically Andean (though this requires further study). Note that a similar
process affected the vowel inventory of Apurucayali Ashéninka, spoken near the Quechua-
speaking highlands (Payne et al. 1982; Lev Michael, personal communication).
Thus, over the course of the last few generations, interregional language contact in the
Urubamba Valley has led to incipient convergence among the three languages involved.
While Andean-Amazonian contacts in the valley waxed and waned –and indeed, at some
points there has been a very clear distinction there between the highlands and the lowlands–
the 20th and 21st centuries have been characterized by interregional connection rather than
division. In this sense, the Urubamba Valley offers a case study in how the kinds of gradual,
inter-elevational linguistic typological patterns observed in Section 28.2 –as opposed to
coherences within the Andes or Amazonia– can emerge.
28.4.2 A multilingual network between Lake Titicaca and the Amazon Plain (15th–16th
centuries)
The second case study considered in this section is about the linguistic connections between
Lake Titicaca and the Amazon Plain before and during the Inca period. While the Titicaca
Basin and Altiplano (above 3,800 meters) are most closely associated today with rural,
Aymara-speaking highland agropastoralists, the region lies just a few tens of kilometers from
the tropical lowland foothills descending to the Amazon Plain, where several other languages
of various families are spoken. People across elevations and from diverse ecological zones
have been in close contact at various moments throughout history, as they have accessed land
and resources by moving between them, by establishing far-flung satellite communities, or by
engaging in enduring relationships with their neighbors. Such processes have led to the
32
continuous formation, disruption, and re-formation of inter-elevational, multilingual social

networks as different actors have come on the scene. In a few cases these transformations
have featured widespread language shift, of the kind that we might expect to result in areal-
typological patterns such as those described in Section 28.2 (and in fact, the various cluster
analyses presented in Section 28.2.4 corroborate this for these languages, as we discuss
below).
Highland-lowland relationships between the Titicaca Basin and the adjacent
Amazonian lowlands have taken many forms throughout the centuries, though as in other
places discussed in this chapter, the regions were largely cut off from each other following the
diseases, violence, and administrative realignments of the colonial period (a division which,
as observed by Saignes 1985: viii, would later be codified in the scholarly division between
Andeanists and Amazonianists). A particularly complex and interesting moment in this
dynamic history comes from the Inca period, when speakers of more than half a dozen
unrelated languages –Aymara, Uru, Puquina, Leko, members of the Takanan, Arawakan, and
Mosetenan families, and others whose identities are not known to us today– were linked in an
integrated network that mediated the flow of goods, people, languages, and political influence
from the Altiplano, through the foothills, and into the Amazon Plain (the ethnohistorical
information presented in this section comes from Saignes 1983, 1985; Renard-Casevitz et al.
1988; Santos-Granero 1992: 48–51; and Dudley 2009, 2011).
Before the Inca expansion in the 15th century, the linguistic situation around Lake
Titicaca was rather different from how we know it today. The Puquina language (which
predated Aymara’s arrival in the Titicaca Basin) was still widely spoken there, particularly to
the east of the lake and into the Eastern foothills (Bouysse-Cassagne 1975, 2010; Domínguez
Faura 2014; see also Chapter 12 by Nicholas Q. Emlen, Arjan Mossel, Simon van de Kerke,
and Willem F.H. Adelaar in this volume), while the Uru language (see Chapter 10 by Katja
Hannß in this volume) was associated with people who lived from fishing on the islands and
shorelines of Lake Titicaca. Aymara was a relative newcomer, probably only having arrived
around 1,000 years ago. Quechuan languages would not expand there until the Inca period.
This linguistic mosaic (as Mannheim 1991 describes it) was documented in a later document
from about 1600 (Bouysse-Cassagne 1975), which showed that speakers of Aymara, Puquina,
and, by that time, Quechuan were densely interspersed among the parishes to the north and
east of Lake Titicaca.
Meanwhile, in the direction of the lowlands, the Kallawaya señorío ‘lordship’ –
apparently Puquina speakers– occupied the land north of Lake Titicaca before the arrival of
the Incas. Their area of control extended eastward through the tropical foothills of Carabaya
and Apolobamba (divided today by the border between Peru and Bolivia, respectively)
(Saignes 1983).11 This territory stretched from 5,000 meters above sea level in the Altiplano
to 1,000 meters in the Amazon, and represented a zone of interaction, mediated by the
Kallawaya, between the highland agropastoralists and the lowland hunters and
11
Saignes (1983:360) argues that the name of the Peruvian province <Carabaya> and the Bolivian ethnonym
<Callahuaya> refer to the same historical entity, and that this orthographic distinction is a colonial artifact (see
also Cerrón-Palomino 2013, inter alia). Note that the pre-Columbian Kallawaya lordship should not be confused
with the Kallawaya herbal healers who live in the same area and speak a language that includes a great deal of
Puquina lexicon (see Chapter 13 by Pieter Muysken in this volume).
33
horticulturalists. The Kallawaya also lived alongside other ethnic groups in the Andean-
Amazonian transitional zone, including the Leko and Aguachile in Apolo, who accessed the
highlands through the Kallawaya, and who in turn bordered Takanan and Mosetenan-speaking
groups further down the slopes (Dudley 2011: 300). The Kallawayas in particular were
acknowledged for their function as intermediaries in the flow of goods between the Amazon
and the Titicaca highlands, so as the Incas gained control of the adjacent highlands, they also
took interest in the Kallawayas’ ability to open the northern and eastern tropical lowlands to
them (Saignes 1983: 362–3). These areas provided gold, fruit, coca, exotic bird feathers,
honey, and all manner of other desirable forest products. The Incas also installed their own
mitmaqkuna (resettled laborers) across Kallawaya territory to provide such products, as had
the Aymara kingdoms before them; it is likely that these resettled laborers were speakers of
Quechuan, Aymaran, Puquina, and perhaps Uru-Chipayan languages from the adjacent
Altiplano. However, some of the Inka mitmaqkuna came from far-flung corners of the empire,
including from Chachapoyas in Northern Peru. Some of these highland mitmaqkuna remained
connected to their home communities, but others depended on the lowlanders that they
encountered instead (Santos-Granero 1992: 50). It was at this time, during the Inca period,
that Quechuan quickly became widespread in the eastern slopes, such that the people of Apolo
(i.e. speakers of Leko and likely Puquina) already spoke Quechua by the time the Spanish first
arrived (Dudley 2011: 305; see also Chapter 25 by César Itier in this volume on similar
instances of Quechuan expansion).
The point of interest to us here is that, before and during the Inca period, the tropical
foothills between Lake Titicaca and the adjacent Amazon Plain were home to a very complex
multiethnic and multilingual society, in which speakers of several unrelated languages were
distributed in a network of close interaction across elevations. Some of these people were
native to the region, while others were newcomers who were resettled in the midst of this
multiethnic transitional zone. Clearly, simple binary distinction between Andeans and
Amazonians simply isn’t helpful in understanding this dynamic. The situation described
above was to be transformed yet again with the arrival of Quechuan, which quickly took its
place as the predominant language north of Lake Titicaca following the Inca arrival; and with
the colonial interventions of the Spanish, which would transform the region’s linguistic
dynamics yet again.
The situation that we see today, which is quite different from the picture described
above, is indeed a result of colonial dynamics. While Puquina had apparently already been in
decline as its speakers shifted to Quechua and Aymara before the colonial period, the Spanish
sped this decline along by promoting a form of Quechua as the language of missionization
and colonial control (Cerrón-Palomino 2016f: 174 notes that Viceroy Toledo even issued a
decree, in 1573, prohibiting the use of Puquina and Aymara). Puquina seems to have
disappeared entirely by the 19th century. Meanwhile, Dudley (2009, 2011) explains that
Franciscans brought together speakers of Leko and other languages into missions in the 17th
and 18th centuries, where they intermarried and formed a new “Apolista” ethnic identity in
Apolo (not to be confused with the Arawakan language called Apolista or Lapacho). As the
Apolo region was brought under Spanish colonial control, and as the region’s inhabitants
became subject to tribute obligations, they were incorporated into a broad new “Andean”
34
social identity. This process of ethnic “Andeanization” –similar in some respects to what we
saw with the Pantahua in Section 28.3– was never completed, as their political claim to
indigenous status remains contested in Bolivia today (Dudley 2011). However, by now
speakers of Leko have shifted almost entirely to Quechua (van de Kerke 2009). Other
languages that did not survive long enough to be documented (e.g. Aguachile) disappeared
without a trace.
The decline of intermediate languages like Puquina and Leko (and others), as their
speakers shifted to Quechua and Aymara and joined an emerging pan-Andean social identity,
was part of a more general “disarticulation” (Dudley 2011) of the Titicaca highlands from the
adjacent lowlands during the colonial period. It is from this perspective that a glance at a
contemporary linguistic map might give the impression of a clean division between Andean
and Amazonian languages. But as the historians of the region cited above urge us to
understand, such a division cannot be projected beyond a few centuries ago.
As a matter of areal typology, this situation also makes clear why we might see the
kinds of continuities in the linguistic structures of highland and lowland languages that we
described in Section 28.2. Puquina, for its part –at least, as it is attested in the single surviving
Puquina document (Oré 1607) –shows substantial convergence to the Quechuan-Aymaran
profile as a result of its long coexistence with those languages (also relevant to this discussion
is the proposal that Puquina is in fact an Arawakan language, reviewed most recently by
Adelaar 2020a). Local Quechuan and Aymaran varieties may also have taken on some
structural features (as well as loanwords) from Puquina as Puquina speakers shifted to those
languages (this process was recently explored by Cerrón-Palomino 2020a). Leko and
especially the Mosetenan and Takanan languages also cluster with the Andean languages in
Fig. 28.1; Zariquiey (2020) discusses some potential cases of lexical borrowing among these
languages. Indeed, such contact effects would be no great surprise when we consider the close
history of continuous interaction, language shift, and intermarriage that existed among those
languages before the colonial period.
28.5 Conclusion
The goal of this chapter has been to explore the linguistic connections between the Central
Andes and Amazonia, from the perspective of areal typology (Section 28.2), linguistic
geography (Section 28.3) and ethnography and ethnohistory (Section 28.4). While many
aspects of the Central Andean linguistic panorama are properly “Andean,” and can be
conceptualized without much consideration of the adjacent eastern lowlands, linguistic
connections to Amazonia have played an important role in other places and at other moments
in history. These linguistic connections become particularly clear when we look beyond the
relatively recent Quechuan and Aymaran expansions, and instead take into consideration
smaller-scale linguistic dynamics, which sometimes cross-cut elevations and ecological zones.
As it turns out, this view of the Central Andean linguistic panorama –characterized by very
high genealogical diversity and more symmetrical social relations than during the great,
expansive Andean political formations– is not terribly different from the Amazonian situation,
and indeed still existed to a large extent during the early colonial period (Urban 2021b). In
light of these connections, there is much to be gained from viewing Western South America
35
not (just) as two coherent and distinct, minimally-interacting spheres, but also as a single,
dynamic, integrated system in which localized bursts of intensive highland-lowland traffic
have played important roles in the region’s linguistic dynamics throughout history.
36
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The Andean-Amazonian interface: Sociolinguistic relations and areal-

Chapter · January 2023

Nicholas Q. Emlen Rik Van Gijn

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28.2 The areal typology of Western South American languages

28.2.1 Andean areal studies

Table 28.1 Andean areal studies

Study Languages considered Approach Areal features

28.2.2 Amazonian areal studies

Table 28.2 Amazonian areal studies

Sample Approach Shared features

Dixon and Unspecified, but Informed • Agglutinative and (poly)synthetic

Aikhenvald Amazon and Orinoco with • More affricates than fricatives

At present, however, there seems to be no convincing case for Amazonia as a

28.2.3 Continental studies

Table 28.3 Continent-wide studies of South American feature distributions

Study Approach Western features (contrasting with east)

Krasnoukhova (2012) is a continent-wide account of noun phrase structure in South American

28.2.4 Pan-Western South American studies

Table 28.4 Pan-Western South American studies of feature distributions

Study Approach Main conclusions

28.2.4.1 Geographical distribution of structural features

28.2.4.2 Elevational distribution of structural features

correspond to those macro-geographical regions. A helpful proxy in this regard is elevation.

Feature label in Description

(i) Continental skewing

(ii) Regional islands

(iii) No clear areal patterning

28.3 Languages and people between the Andes and Amazonia

28.3.1 Some broad-scale patterns

28.4 Two Andean-Amazonian multilingual networks

continuous formation, disruption, and re-formation of inter-elevational, multilingual social

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De Ocampo, Baltasar. (1907[1610]). ‘Account of the Province of Vilcapampa and a Narrative

Derbyshire, Desmond C. (1987). ‘Morphosyntactic Areal Characteristics of Amazonian

Derbyshire, Desmond C., and Geoffrey K. Pullum. (1986). ‘Introduction,’ in Desmond C.

Dixon, R.M.W., and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (1999). ‘Introduction,’ in R. M. W. Dixon and

Dudley, Meredith. (2009). ‘Intermediation, Ethnogenesis, and Landscape Transformation at

Emlen, Nicholas Q. (2015). ‘Public Discourse and Community Formation in a Trilingual

Emlen, Nicholas Q. (2020). Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian

Emlen, Nicholas Q. (2020). ‘The many Spanishes of an Andean-Amazonian Crossroads,’ in

Emlen, Nicholas Q. (2023). ‘The Quechuan-Aymaran relationship,’ in Matthias Urban (ed.),

Fioravanti, Eduardo. (1974). Latifundio y sindicalismo agrario en el Perú: El caso de los

Hornborg, Alf. (2020). ‘Anthropology,’ in Adrian J. Pearce, David G. Beresford-Jones, and

Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática. (2017). xii Censo de Población, vii de

Muysken, Pieter. (1986). ‘Approaches to Suffix Order,’ Linguistics 24 (3): 629–43.

Payne, Doris L. (1990b). ‘Introduction,’ in Doris L. Payne (ed.), Amazonian Linguistics:

Payne, Doris L. (2001). ‘Review of The Amazonian Languages, by R. M. W. Dixon & A.

Rosengren, Dan. (2004). ‘Los Matsigenka,’ in Fernando Santos-Granero and Frederica

Santos-Granero, Fernando. (1992). Etnohistoria de la alta amazonía, Siglos xv al xviii. Quito:

Urban, Matthias. (2021a). ‘Language Classification, Language Contact and Andean

Zariquiey, Roberto. (2020). ‘Hypothesized Language Relationships across the Andes–

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