Karajá language

Karajá
Native to	Brazil
Region	Araguaia River
Ethnicity	3,600 Karajá people (2007)[1]
Native speakers	2,700 (2006)[1]
Language family	Macro-Gê Ofaie Karajá
Dialects	Javaé Xambioá
Language codes
ISO 639-3	kpj
Glottolog	kara1500[2]

Karajá, also known as Ynã, is spoken by the Karajá people in some thirty villages in central Brazil. Dialects are North Karaja, South Karaja, Xambioá, and Javaé. There are distinct male and female forms of speech; one of the principal differences is that men drop the sound /k/, which is pronounced by women.

Karaja is a verb-final language,^[3] with simple noun and more complex verbal morphology that includes noun incorporation. Verbs inflect for direction as well as person, mood, object, and voice.

Phonology

Karajá has nine oral vowels, /i e ɛ, ɨ ə a, u o ɔ/, and two nasal vowels, /ə̃ õ/. /a/ is nasalized word initially and when preceded by /h/ or a voiced stop: /aθi/ → [ãθi] 'grass', /ɔha/ → [ɔhã] 'armadillo'; this in turn nasalizes a preceding /b/ or /d/: /bahadu/ → [mãhãdu] 'group', /dadi/ → [nãdi] 'my mother'.^[4]

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i	ɨ	u
Mid	e, ɛ	ə, ə̃	o, õ
Open		a	ɔ

This language has vowel harmony that matches vowels' tenseness to the vowel of the following suffix.^[5]

V → [+ATR] / _ (C)-V_[+ATR]

There are only twelve consonants, eight of which are coronal:^[6]

		Labial	Dental	Postalveolar	Velar	Glottal
Stop/Affricate	Voiceless			tʃ	k
	Voiced	b	d	dʒ
Implosive			ɗ
Fricative			θ	ʃ		h
Lateral			l
Sonorant		w	ɾ

Men's and women's speech

Some examples of the differences between men's and women's speech, especially the presence or lack of /k/ (including in borrowings from Portuguese), follow:^[7]

Women	Men	Gloss
kɔɗu	ɔɗu	turtle
kɔlukɔ	ɔluɔ	labret
kaɾitʃakɾe	aɾiakɾe	I will walk*
bɛɾaku	beɾo	river
adõda	aõda	thinɡ
dõbĩku	dõbĩu	Sunday (from Portuguese domingo)

* The /itʃa/ derives historically from *ika

The second person pronoun /kai/ is an exception to this rule, and is pronounced the same by men and women.^[5]

Notes

1. Karajá at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Karajá". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
3. Rodrigues (1999), pp. 187-88
4. Rodrigues (1999), pp. 172-73
5. Ribeiro, Eduardo (2012). A Grammar of Karaja. Chicago, IL: Dissertation of University of Chicago.
6. Rodgrigues (1999), pp. 176-78
7. Rodrigues (1999), pg. 177

References

• Ribeiro, Eduardo Rivail. (2002) "Direction in Karajá". In Rosa María Ortiz Ciscomani, ed., Vi encuentro internacional de lingüística en el noroeste.
• Ribeiro, Eduard Rivail. (2000) "[ATR] vowel harmony and palatalization in Karajá". Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics. 10: Proceedings of wail 2000. pp. 80–89.
• Rodrigues, Aryon D. (1999) "Macro-Jê". In R. M. W. Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (eds.), The Amazonian Languages. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

External links

• http://indian-cultures.com/Cultures/karaja.html
• Alain Fabre, 2005, Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos: KARAJÁ