Munichi is an extinct language which was spoken in the village of Munichis, about 10 miles (16 km) west of
Yurimaguas
Yurimaguas is a port town in the Loreto Region of the northeastern Peruvian Amazon. Historically associated with the Mainas missions, the culturally diverse town is affectionately known as the "Pearl of the Huallaga" (''Perla del Huallaga''). Y ...
,
Loreto Region
Loreto () is Peru's northernmost department and region. Covering almost one-third of Peru's territory, Loreto is by far the nation's largest department, slightly smaller than Japan; it is also one of the most sparsely populated regions due to ...
,
Peru
Peru, officially the Republic of Peru, is a country in western South America. It is bordered in the north by Ecuador and Colombia, in the east by Brazil, in the southeast by Bolivia, in the south by Chile, and in the south and west by the Pac ...
. In 1988, there were two mother-tongue speakers, but they had not met since the 1970s. The last known fluent speaker, Victoria Huancho Icahuate, died in the late 1990s. As of 2009 there were several semi-speakers who retained significant lexical, and partial grammatical, knowledge of the language (Michael et al. 2013).
It is also called ''Balsapuertiño'', named after the village of
Balsapuerto in the
department of Loreto, Peru.
Word order in Munichi is
VSO.
Other varieties
Unattested "Munichi stock" varieties listed by Loukotka (1968):
*Tabaloso - spoken in Loreto department in the village of Tabalosa on the
Mayo River
*Chasutino (Cascoasoa) - once spoken in the village of Chasuta on the
Huallaga River; now only Quechua is spoken.
*Huatama (Otanavi) - once spoken in the villages of
San José de Sisa and Otanahui in the same region; now only Quechua is spoken.
*Lama (Lamista) - extinct language once spoken on the
Moyobamba
Moyobamba () or Muyupampa ( Quechua ''muyu'' circle, ''pampa'' large plain, "circle plain") is the capital city of the San MartÃn Region in northern Peru. Called "Santiago of eight valleys of Moyobamba" or "Maynas capital". There are 50,073 inh ...
River. The last survivors now speak only Quechua or Spanish.
*Suchichi (Suriche) - extinct language once spoken in the village of
Tarapoto
Tarapoto, founded in 1782 as Santa Cruz de los Motilones de Tarapoto, is a commercial hub town in the San MartÃn Province of the Department of San MartÃn of northern Peru. It is an hour by plane from Lima, in the high jungle plateau to the east ...
in the same region
*Zapaso - extinct language from the same region, once spoken on the
Saposoa River
*Nindaso - once spoken on the
Huallaga River north of the Zapaso tribe
*Nomona - once spoken on the left bank of the
Saposoa River
Varieties listed by
Mason (1950):
*Muniche
*Muchimo
*Otanabe
*Churitana
Classification
The language is considered an isolate (Michael et al. 2013), but the
pronominal
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not con ...
suffixes
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...
bear a close resemblance to those reconstructed for proto-
Arawakan
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 ...
(Gibson 1996:18-19), and some lexical items are similar to ones in Arawakan languages (Jolkesky 2016:310–317). Although Jolkesky (''id''.) argues that the language belongs to a putative
Macro-Arawakan stock, evidence has yet to be provided for placing it either in a sister branch to the Arawakan language family or in a branch within this language family. There is substantial borrowing from the local variety of
Quechua, and to a lesser extent from
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas
**Spanish cuisine
**Spanish history
**Spanish culture
...
and
Cahuapanan languages (Michael et al. 2013).
Language contact
Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the
Cholon-Hibito,
Kechua, and
Mochika language families due to contact.
Phonology
Munichi has six vowels: /a, e, i, ɨ, o, u/.
Vocabulary
Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items for Munichi.
:
See also
Kichwa-Lamista people
References
Bibliography
* Gibson, Michael L. 1996. ''El Munichi: Un idioma que se extingue''. Serie LingüÃstica Peruana, 42. Pucallpa: Instituto LingüÃstico de Verano
Available here
* Jolkesky, M. 2016. Estudo arqueo-ecolinguÃstico das terras tropicais sul-americanas. Brasilia: UnB. PhD Dissertation
Available here
* Michael, Lev, Stephanie Farmer, Greg Finley, Christine Beier, and Karina Sullón Acosta. 2013. A sketch of Muniche segmental and prosodic phonology. International Journal of American Linguistics 79(3):307-347.
*Michael, L.; Beier, Ch.; Acosta, K. S.; Farmer, S.; Finley, G.; Roswell, M. (2009). Dekyunáwa: Un diccionario de nuestro idioma muniche. (Manuscript).
{{Arawakan languages
Extinct languages of South America
Language isolates of South America
Languages of Peru
Indigenous languages of the Americas
Languages extinct in the 1990s
Verb–subject–object languages