By Sarah-Claire Jordan
Most people know that the official language of Colombia is Spanish, with around 99% of the population speaking it. However, since this is Latin America, a land conquered and colonized by Europe, there must have been languages spoken there before the Spanish came and claimed the area as their own. The same goes for the thriving slave trade in the Caribbean, with so many East African people torn from their homelands and forced to live and work along the Caribbean. Other ethnic groups have made their homes in Colombia as well, bringing with them their cultures and languages.
Though Colombian Spanish is a variety of Spanish unique to Colombia, it isn’t the most interesting language spoken there. Here are four languages you probably didn’t know were spoken in Colombia:
1. Kuna
This is the language of the Kuna people, a group indigenous to some areas of Colombia as well as Panama. The language is still spoken by the same people today, though it much smaller numbers thanks to Spanish colonization. Kuna has four vowels and seventeen consonants, and is an agglutinative language where all words longer than one morpheme are essentially compound words. The Kuna alphabet is only 15 letters long, thanks to a spelling reform that happened in 2010.
2. Nukak
Another language indigenous to Colombia is Nukak, whose relationship with other languages is a bit mysterious. It is very similar to Kakwa, another indigenous language, so much so that they are mutually intelligible. In nouns, adjectives, and verbs, there are different vowel tones that are used. Gender, case, and number are all used to mark nouns, and there are two grammatical genders. There are also many different forms of adverbs in Nukak.
3. Palenquero
Palenquero is a Spanish-based creole language, the only one in Latin America. As of 1998, around 3,000 people spoke it, most of them living in a small village called San Basilio de Palenque. The village was originally a village populated by runaway slaves, who spoke African languages, like Kongo and Bantu. The creole that resulted is mostly spoken by the older generation, and speakers of Palenquero face discrimination for their language. It is not mutually intelligible with Spanish, though some words were clearly derived from Spanish.
4. Romani
Romani is actually officially recognized by Colombia as a minority language there. Today, there are around 5,000 Romani people living in Colombia, who are thought to have come over from Spain starting in the 19th century. The language itself is an Indo-Aryan language that possibly traces its roots back to Sanskrit. There are seven known varieties of Romani, the largest being Vlax Romani. This is also the dialect spoken in Colombia and is written using a modified Latin alphabet. Unfortunately like many minority languages, those who speak Romani in Colombia have faced discrimination.
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