Yucuna (Jukuna), also known as Matapi, Yucuna-Matapi, and Yukunais,
is an
Arawakan language
Arawakan (''Arahuacan, Maipuran Arawakan, "mainstream" Arawakan, Arawakan proper''), also known as Maipurean (also ''Maipuran, Maipureano, Maipúre''), is a language family that developed among ancient Indigenous peoples in South America. Branch ...
spoken in several communities along the
Mirití-Paraná River in
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country primarily located in South America with Insular region of Colombia, insular regions in North America. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the north, Venezuel ...
. Extinct Guarú (Garú) was either a dialect or a closely related language. Yucuna is a polysynthetic language, and it uses SVO word order.
The Matapi, a
Tucanoan people, lived at the headwaters of the
Popeyacá and
Yapiyá, tributaries to the
Miriti River and
Apaporis River but most may have been sold as slaves or moved to Brazil. The remainder joined the Yucuna.
Phonology
The Yucuna phoneme inventory consists of 16 consonants and 5 vowels.
See also
*
Cariban languages
The Cariban languages are a family of languages Indigenous to north-eastern South America. They are widespread across northernmost South America, from the mouth of the Amazon River to the Colombian Andes, and they are also spoken in small poc ...
Notes and references
Notes
Bibliography
*
*
External links
* Resources by ethnographer Laurent Fontaine:
*
Audio recordings in the Yucuna language in open access
(source: ''Pangloss Collection
The Pangloss Collection is a digital library whose objective is to store and facilitate access to audio recordings in endangered languages of the world. Developed by the LACITO centre of CNRS in Paris, the collection provides free online access ...
'' of CNRS
The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe.
In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...
).
*
The Yucuna Indians*
(in Yucuna and French)
*
* Resources by linguist Magdalena Lemus Serrano:
*
Documentation of Yucuna(source: '' Endangered Languages Archive'').
Languages of Colombia
Arawakan languages
{{Arawakan-lang-stub