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Concept
Pirahã language
Summary
Pirahã (also spelled Pirahá, Pirahán), or Múra-Pirahã, is the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. The Pirahã live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon River.
Pirahã is the only surviving dialect of the Mura language; all others having died out in the last few centuries as most groups of the Mura people have shifted to Portuguese. Suspected relatives, such as Matanawi, are also extinct. Pirahã is estimated to have between 250 and 380 speakers. It is not in immediate danger of extinction, as its use is vigorous and the Pirahã community is mostly monolingual.
The Pirahã language is most notable as the subject of various controversial claims; for example, that it provides evidence for linguistic relativity. The controversy is compounded by the sheer difficulty of learning the language; the number of linguists with field experience in Pirahã is very small.
Speakers refer to their language as Apáitisí, and to their own ethnic group as Hiáitihí.
The Pirahã language is one of the phonologically simplest languages known, comparable to Rotokas (New Guinea) and the Lakes Plain languages such as Obokuitai. There is a claim that Pirahã has as few as ten phonemes, one fewer than Rotokas, or even as few as nine for women, but this requires analyzing [k] as an underlying /hi/ and having /h/ invariably substituted for /s/ in female speech. Although such a phenomenon is odd cross-linguistically, Ian Maddieson has found in researching Pirahã data that /k/ does indeed exhibit an unusual distribution in the language.
The 'ten phoneme' claim also does not consider the tones of Pirahã, at least two of which are phonemic (marked by an acute accent and either unmarked or marked by a grave accent in Daniel Everett), bringing the number of phonemes to at least twelve. Sheldon (1988) claims three tones, high (1), mid (2) and low (3).
When languages have inventories as small and allophonic variation as great as in Pirahã and Rotokas, different linguists may have very different ideas as to the nature of their phonological systems.
Official source
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