Language contact in Caquetá and Putumayo river basins in Northwest Amazonia

The area between the Caquetá and Putumayo (C-P) River Basins, spanning southern Colombia and northern Peru, is loosely defined in the literature as the ‘People of the Centre cultural complex’ (Echeverri, 1997). It consists of eight ethnolinguistic groups that belong to three distinct language families (Witotoan, Boran, and Arawak), plus one isolate (Andoque). Traditionally, these groups lived next to each other, and displayed relative cultural homogeneity (Eriksen, 2011). The C-P languages share a daunting number of linguistic traits, including nominal classification, evidentiality, and differential object marking. Why so? This paper will report on work currently underway to uncover the patterns of contact-induced change between the extant languages in the C-P area