Sirionó (Mbia Cheë; also written as Mbya, Siriono) is a

Tupian The Tupi or Tupian language family comprises some 70 languages spoken in South America, of which the best known are Tupi proper and Guarani. Homeland and ''urheimat'' Rodrigues (2007) considers the Proto-Tupian urheimat to be somewhere between ...

(Tupi–Guarani, Subgroup II) language spoken by about 400 Sirionó people (50 are

monolingual Monoglottism (Greek μόνος ''monos'', "alone, solitary", + γλῶττα , "tongue, language") or, more commonly, monolingualism or unilingualism, is the condition of being able to speak only a single language, as opposed to multilingualism. ...

) and 120 Yuqui in eastern

Bolivia , image_flag = Bandera de Bolivia (Estado).svg , flag_alt = Horizontal tricolor (red, yellow, and green from top to bottom) with the coat of arms of Bolivia in the center , flag_alt2 = 7 × 7 square p ...

(eastern Beni and northwestern Santa Cruz departments) in the village of Ibiato (Eviato) and along the Río Blanco in farms and ranches.

Phonology

Sirionó has phonemic contrasts between front, central, and back, close and mid vowels, i.e.

Notes

References

* Firestone, Homer L. (1965). ''Description and Classification of Sirionó''. London: Mouton. * Holmberg, Allan. (1958). The Sirionó. In J. Steward (Ed.), ''Handbook of South American Indians: The Tropical Forest Tribes'' (Vol. 3, pp. 455–463. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. * Holmberg, Allan. (1969). ''Nomads of the Long Bow: The Sirionó of Eastern Bolivia'' (rev. ed.). Garden City, NY: Natural History Press. * Ingham, John M. (1971). Are the Siriono Raw or Cooked? ''American Anthropologist'', ''73'' (5), 1092-1099. * Priest, Perry N.; Priest, Anne M.; & Grimes, Joseph E. (1961). Simultaneous Orderings in Sirionó (Guaraní). ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', ''27'', 335-44. * Scheffler, Harold W. (1972). Systems of Kin Classification: A Structural Typology. In P. Reining (Ed.), ''Kinship Studies in the Morgan Centennial Year'' (pp. 111–33). Washington, D.C.: Anthropological Society of Washington. * Scheffler, Harold W.; & Lounsbury, Floyd G. (1971). ''A Study in Structural Semantics: The Sirionó Kinship System''. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

External links

Sirionó dictionary online from IDS
(select simple or advanced browsing)
PROEL: Lengua Sirionó