Shipibo-Conibo Language

Shipibo (also Shipibo-Conibo, Shipibo-Konibo) is a Panoan language spoken in Peru and Brazil by approximately 26,000 speakers. Shipibo is an official language of Peru.

Dialects

Shipibo has three attested dialects:

* Shipibo and Konibo (Conibo), which have merged
* Kapanawa of the Tapiche River, which is obsolescent

Extinct Xipináwa (Shipinawa) is thought to have been a dialect as well, but there is no linguistic data.

Phonology

Vowels

* and are lower than their cardinal counterparts (in addition to being more front in the latter case): , , is more front than cardinal : , whereas is more close and more central than cardinal . The first three vowels tend to be somewhat more central in closed syllables, whereas before coronal consonants (especially ) can be as central as .
* In connected speech, two adjacent vowels may be realized as a rising diphthong.

Nasal

* The oral vowels are phonetically nasalized after a nasal consonant, but the phonological behaviour of these allophones is different from the nasal vowel phonemes .
* Oral vowels in syllables preceding syllables with nasal vowels are realized as nasal, but not when a consonant other than intervenes.

Unstressed

* The second one of the two adjacent unstressed vowels is often deleted.
* Unstressed vowels may be devoiced or even elided between two voiceless obstruents.

Consonants

* are bilabial, whereas is labialized velar.
** is most typically a fricative , but other realizations (such as an approximant , a stop and an affricate ) also appear. The stop realization is most likely to appear in word-initial stressed syllables, whereas the approximant realization appears most often as onsets to non-initial unstressed syllables.
* are alveolar , whereas is dental .
* The distinction can be described as an apical–laminal one.
* is velar, whereas is palatal.
* Before nasal vowels, are nasalized and may be even realized close to nasal stops .
* is realized as before , as before and as before . It does not occur before .
* is a very variable sound:
** Intervocalically, it is realized either as continuant, with or without weak frication ( or ).
** Sometimes (especially in the beginning of a stressed syllable) it can be realized as a postalveolar affricate , or a stop-appproximant sequence .
** It can also be realized as a postalveolar flap .

References

Bibliography

* Campbell, Lyle. (1997). ''American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America''. New York: Oxford University Press. .
* Elias-Ulloa, Jose (2000). El Acento en Shipibo (Stress in Shipibo). Thesis. Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima - Peru.
* Elias-Ulloa, Jose (2005). Theoretical Aspects of Panoan Metrical Phonology: Disyllabic Footing and Contextual Syllable Weight. Ph. D. Dissertation. Rutgers University. ROA 80


* Fleck, David W. (10 October 2013).
Panoan Languages and Linguistics
' (PDF). Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History (no. 99). .
* Kaufman, Terrence. (1990). Language history in South America: What we know and how to know more. In D. L. Payne (Ed.), ''Amazonian linguistics: Studies in lowland South American languages'' (pp. 13–67). Austin: University of Texas Press. .
* Kaufman, Terrence. (1994). The native languages of South America. In C. Mosley & R. E. Asher (Eds.), ''Atlas of the world's languages'' (pp. 46–76). London: Routledge.
* Loriot, James and Barbara E. Hollenbach. 1970. "Shipibo paragraph structure." Foundations of Language 6: 43-66. (This was the seminal Discourse Analysis paper taught at SIL in 1956-7.)
* Loriot, James, Erwin Lauriault, and Dwight Day, compilers. 1993. Diccionario shipibo - castellano. Serie Lingüística Peruana, 31. Lima: Ministerio de Educación and Instituto Lingüístico de Verano. 554 p. (Spanish zip-file available online http://www.sil.org/americas/peru/show_work.asp?id=928474530143&Lang=eng) This has a complete grammar published in English by SIL only available through SIL.
*

External links

Shipibo-Conibo
at Ethnologue

Lengua Shipibo
at Proel

Shipibo-Conibo
(Intercontinental Dictionary Series)

{{Authority control
Panoan languages
Languages of Peru
Languages of Brazil
Indigenous languages of Western Amazonia