The Boruca language is known by its speakers as Di^v Tégat, and it means 'our speech' (Di^v 'ours', Tégat 'speech'), or also Brún̈cajc, which is why it is also known as Brunca. It belongs to the Western Isthmic group of the Chibchan language family (Constenla 2011: 137).

According to Quesada Pacheco (2018: 15), the Boruca people live in the southern region of Costa Rica, specifically in the district of Boruca, in the canton of Buenos Aires, in the province of Puntarenas; the villages where this people are located are: Boruca (Brún̈cajc), Barranco (Cajc Chí^v), Cajón (Cobó^v), Camancragua (Camancrahua), Currés (Yímba), Chamba (Shámba), Changuenita (Dí^vba), Doboncragua, Iguana (Rít Cajc), Lagarto (Cú^vrahuá), Mano de Tigre (Curá^v Cu^vstan̈), Presa, Puerto Nuevo (Yán̈), San Joaquín (Surá^v Chí^v), Santa Cruz, Tigre and Tres Ríos. Most of the Indigenous population of the district is concentrated in Boruca and Currés, and both regions have been designated as Indigenous territories. According to the 2011 censuses (INEC: 2011), 5555 Costa Ricans self-identified as being of Boruca origin; of these, 2593 live within the Boruca Indigenous territories.

The first mention of the Boruca ethnic group dates back to 1522 under the name «provincia de Durucaca» during the expedition of Gil González Dávila. In 1562, Juan Vázquez de Coronado mentioned the villages of Borucaca and Turucaca. In 1569, some 350 people are mentioned as belonging to the Boruca palenque (Quesada Pacheco 1996: 20).

There are no data on the number of speakers in the 20th century; however, according to the data of Mr. Nemesio González, one of the last Boruca speakers, by 1950 there were 14 monolingual people; all except one were women, in addition to 70 bilingual people (Quesada Pacheco 2018: 19). The last fluent speaker died in 2003; today, a dozen adult people still understand Boruca and can reproduce it perfectly; however, they do not use it as the main or basic language in their daily communication, which is why they are not often considered as fluent speakers.

Despite the above, interest in Boruca culture has intensified in recent years, there has been a rise in the practice of customs and traditions, many young people today proudly express their ethnic affiliation, and more and more people express their desire to speak the language again.

The teaching of the Boruca language has been promoted since the 1970s; first, through the private initiative of Mr. Espíritu Santo Maroto (1904-1981), who provided lessons to children and adults, while translating many contemporary, scientific, historical, and cultural texts, from Spanish into the Boruca language, thus making it possible to update the language to the communicative needs of the modern time (his pedagogical and ethno-linguistic work is available in Maroto 1999). And then, through public schools in the region, with the support of the Ministry of Public Education. The new generation of Boruca speakers is the product of these initiatives.

The most prominent morphosyntactic features of Boruca are the SOV order, possessor-possessed order, the absence of grammatical gender, the postpositions, the adjective goes to the right of the noun, the personal pronouns function as possessive adjectives; demonstratives, possessives, and numerals precede the noun, the plural is marked with the independent particle rójc, which is placed to the right of the noun or the verbal form. It has the determiner qui , which is placed to the right of the noun, and the focal morpheme an̈ (Quesada Pacheco 2018: 101). The verbal system is temporal, and the aspect and the modality are expressed through suffixes.

Written by Dr. Miguel Ángel Quesada Pacheco

Bergen University, Norway

2020