Data collected by UNICEF and the DoBes programme

Data on the Yuracaré language

Alternative names: yurakaré, yura, yurujure

Main dialects:

According to Van Gijn (2006), although there is a certain amount of variation in the different communities of speakers, there are no dialects of Yuracaré.

Classification: Yuracaré is generally considered to be a language isolate.

There have been suggestions that Yuracaré might be linked to geographically close languages such as the Quechua languages Mosetén, Itonama and Cayuvava, but this has yet to be proven.

Geographical area:

Moxos Province in the Béni department, and the Chapare and Carrasco regions of Cochabamba Department, Bolivia.

The speakers of Yuracaré are scattered throughout the territory between the Isíboro and Securé rivers in the North-West and the Mamoré and Ichílo rivers in the East-South-East; and also along the basins of the Chimore, Chapare and Ichoa rivers.

Number of speakers: According to the Bolivian census of 2000, there were 1809 speakers of Yuracaré in an ethnic population of 2809 people. UNESCO gives a figure of 2675 speakers and DoBes estimates that there are around 2500 speakers.

Status of the language:

According to the terms of supreme decree 25894 of 11th September, approved in 2000, Yuracaré is one of the “officially recognised indigenous” languages of Bolivia.

Teaching:

Yuracaré is used in local bilingual schooling in the first years of Primary school. Later, students gradually become monolingual in Spanish.

Vitality and transmission: Yuracaré is an endangered language according to UNESCO criteria.

A break in transmission took place 15 to 20 years ago at which time all of the speakers were over 30 years old. Even among the last generation of native speakers, Spanish is the preferred language. Almost all speakers are bilingual in Yuracaré and Spanish. There are 519 monolingual speakers remaining, but according to Crevels (2010), this figure should be viewed with caution as the likely reality is that this figure is lower.

The younger generations have inherited negative stereotypes surrounding their ethnic identity. These negative stereotypes have been circulated by the mixed population of Bolivia for many years, which could explain the dramatic and rapid decline of the language.

Yuracaré is part of a documentation and revitalisation project being carried out by the Max Planck Institute, with funding from the DoBes programme.

Historical Observations

The first mention of Yuracaré was in the colonial literature of the 16th century. The speakers at this time probably lived further south than they currently do, near the present day town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

It is difficult to determine whether or not they were under the rule of the Incas at the time of the Andean colonial expansion.

During the Guarani migration in the 16th century, they were far enough away so as not to be subjected to slavery and so, they escaped the assimilation that was forced upon peoples such as the Chané.

The arrival of the Spanish created considerable changes in the region, particularly after the founding of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. The Yuracaré people were forced to relocate and isolate themselves in order to survive, which made them relatively resistant to penetration by the Jesuit missions in the area. Overall, the Yuracarés have been more successful in their resistance to missionaries than neighbouring populations. In the 1950s, however, the New Tribe Mission was successful in gaining a foothold in certain communities.

At this time, the opening of the road from Cochabamba to Santa Cruz allowed farmers and former miners from the Andes to move into the region. They burned down forest in order to transform the land into agrarian zones or areas for the production of rubber, and most notably for cocoa plantations and areas for manufacture of illegal substances, leading to drug trafficking. This migration continues to this day, ever more reducing the land of the Yuracaré people and forcing them to constantly relocate. It has also caused other populations to move closer to Yuracaré lands.

Ethnographic observations

Based at the intersection of high and lowlands, the Yuracaré find themselves at the meeting point of three cultures: the Andean cultures from the West, the Amazonian cultures from the East, and the cultures of the Chaco region in the South-East. The Yuracaré share cultural features with each of the other cultures, but their way of life is most similar to the lowland Amazonian populations.

Traditionally, the Yuracaré people relied on an economy of slash-and-burn agriculture, fishing, hunting and gathering. In this day and age, this type of economy tends not to exist and so, the Yuracaré tend more and more to be restricted to work as agricultural labourers in plantations, especially cocoa plantations.

Their villages were traditionally very fragmented, with non-permanent houses that were quite far apart from one another. These villages are made up of groups of families. The nuclear family is the basic social unit and families are quite independent. Even though a village is made up of several families, the groupings are constantly restructured. The Yuracaré are thus quite mobile, but should not be confused with subsistence nomads.

These days, influenced by Western society and missionaries, the population is more sedentary and the villages have greater populations within smaller boundaries. Not much of their traditional mythology remains and many of their cultural practices have been abandoned in the last fifty years.

There are more and more ethnically different indigenous communities living on Yuracaré land. In the provinces of Cochabamba, the Yuracaré mostly associate with the Quechuas. In the Béni department, they are in permanent contact with the Trinitarios (who speak a language from the Arawak family), and there are even interethnic marriage alliances.

For more information on the Yuracaré, see the DoBes programme web site.

Sources

Crevels, Mily (2010) Bolivia Amazónica In « Atlas sociolingüístico de pueblos indígenas en América Latina », UNICEF. Vol. 1, pp 281-300

Fabre, Alain. 2005. Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos. Online version available [consulted on 20/04/2011]

Online sources

Data collected by UNICEF on Yuracaré (in Spanish) [20/04/2011]

The Yuracaré page on the DoBes programme site [20/04/2011]

The Yuracaré page on the Linguamón web site [20/04/2011]

The Yuracaré pages on the Amazonia.bo web site (in Spanish) [20/04/2011]

Additional bibliography

Van Gijn, Rik (2006) A Grammar of Yurakaré. PhD. thesis Nijmegen: Radboud Universiteit. Online version available (in Dutch).

See l’Atlas sociolingüístico de pueblos indígenas en América Latina (in Spanish) and Fabre (2005) (also in Spanish) for a more complete bibliography.