The Choco languages are a small family of Native American languages spread across Colombia and Panama. They consist of the following groups:

• Emberan languages, with over 60,000 speakers mainly in Colombia (a fairly mutually intelligible set divided into 6 languages by the Ethnologue)
• Woun Meu language, or Wounaan, with some 6000 speakers on the Panama-Colombia border
• Anserma language (extinct)
• Runa language (extinct)
• Arma language (extinct)
• Cenu language (extinct)
• Cauca language (extinct)

They are classified by Joseph Greenberg as Nuclear Paezan languages - most closely related to the Paezan and Barbacoan families - while others, seeing his conclusions as over-hasty, prefer to consider them an isolated group.

Bibliography

• Loewen Jacob, 1963. "Choco I & Choco II ", IJAL 29.
• Mortensen, Charles A. A Reference Grammar of the Northern Embera Languages. Studies in the Languages of Colombia 7. SIL Publications in Linguistics 134, 1999
• Licht, Daniel Aguirre. Embera. Languages of the World/Materials 208. LINCOM 1999.

External links

• SIL in Colombia (http://www.sil.org/americas/colombia/Language/engl_lang.htm) (includes bibliographies for several)