Kashinawa (also spelled ''Kaxinawá, Kashinawa, Kaxynawa, Caxinawa, Caxinawá, and Cashinahua''), or Hantxa Kuin (''Hãtxa Kuĩ''), is an indigenous American language of western South America which belongs to the
Panoan language family. It is spoken by about 1,600
Kaxinawá in Peru, along the Curanja and the
Purus Rivers, and in Brazil by 400 Kaxinawá in the state of
Acre
The acre is a unit of land area used in the imperial and US customary systems. It is traditionally defined as the area of one chain by one furlong (66 by 660 feet), which is exactly equal to 10 square chains, of a square mile, 4,840 square ...
.
About five to ten percent of speakers have some Spanish language proficiency,
"Kashinawa."
''Ethnologue.'' Retrieved 8 Dec 2011. while forty percent are literate and twenty to thirty percent are literate in Spanish as a second language.
Dialects are Brazilian Kashinawa, Peruvian Kashinawa, and the extinct Juruá Kapanawa (Capanahua of the Juruá River) and Paranawa.
Phonology
Vowels
* In final syllables, are heard as .
* can also be heard as mid-back .
*Although nasalization is generally marked by placing a tilde
The tilde () or , is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in turn came from the Latin ''titulus'', meaning "title" or "superscription". Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in ...
over the vowel, some authors choose to mark it with a following to denote that the previous vowel or contiguous vowels are nasalised.
Consonants
* The stop consonant d may be pronounced as an alveolar flap when between two vowels, like the North American English
North American English (NAmE, NAE) is the most generalized variety (linguistics), variety of the English language as spoken in the United States and Canada. Because of their related histories and cultures, plus the similarities between the pron ...
pronunciation of in the word ''ladder''.
Dictionary
A dictionary has been compiled and published since 1980.
Orthography
The Roman alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...
is used. There is an interrogative punctuation mark different from the question mark.
Morphology
Articles and adjectives are placed after nouns. There are seven prefixes and five suffixes.
References
External links
Cashinahua Pronunciation and Spelling Guide
Native Languages of the Americas website. 1998-2008.
* Wise, Mary Ruth. 1981. ''Diccionario Cashinahua''. Yarinacocha, Peru: Instituto Lingüístico del Verano.
Animacy and mythology in Hantxa Kuin (Cashinahua)
Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
* Kensinger, Kenneth M
The phonological hierarchy of Cashinahua (Pano)
Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of Oklahoma. 1963.
* Montag, Richard. 200
Participant Referencing in Cashinahua
SIL International.
Cashinahua DoReCo corpus
compiled by Sabine Reiter. Audio recordings of narrative texts with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level, translations, and - for some texts - time-aligned morphological annotations.
{{Authority control
Languages of Peru
Languages of Brazil
Panoan languages