Resígaro 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 the

department of Loreto 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 ...

. It is believed to be nearly extinct as of 2017 with only one remaining speaker.

Classification

Aikhenvald (1999) classifies it among the Western Nawiki Upper Amazonian languages. Kaufman (1994) had made it a separate branch of Upper Amazonian.

History

During the

Putumayo genocide The Putumayo genocide () refers to the severe exploitation and subsequent ethnocide of the Indigenous population in the Putumayo region. The booms of raw materials incentivized the exploration and occupation of uncolonised land in the Amazon by ...

, many Resígaro people were enslaved by Julio Cesar Arana's rubber company. Resígaros entrapped by Arana's company were dedicated to the extraction of rubber at the stations of La Sabana and Santa Catalina, which was managed by the Rodriguez brothers. In 1910, a manager of Arana's company told

Roger Casement Roger David Casement (; 1 September 1864 – 3 August 1916), known as Sir Roger Casement, CMG, between 1911 and 1916, was a diplomat and Irish nationalist executed by the United Kingdom for treason during World War I. He worked for the Britis ...

that the Rodriguez brothers had killed hundreds of indigenous people. On November 25, 2016, the last female speaker of Resígaro, Rosa Andrade, was brutally murdered in a beheading at the age of 67. Her niece reported “She was beheaded. Her head was not found, neither her heart.” The only other remaining speaker known was Andrade's brother, Pablo Andrade, who still lives. He and his late sister had been preparing a project with the

Ministry of Culture Ministry of Culture may refer to: * Ministry of Tourism, Cultural Affairs, Youth and Sports (Albania) * Ministry of Culture (Algeria) * Ministry of Culture (Argentina) * Minister for the Arts (Australia) * Ministry of Culture (Azerbaijan)Ministry o ...

to document their language since October 2016, and to update books on grammar and an outdated dictionary made in the 1950s by the

Summer Institute of Linguistics SIL Global (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics International) is an evangelical Christian nonprofit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, to expan ...

, that promoted the translation of the

Bible The Bible is a collection of religious texts that are central to Christianity and Judaism, and esteemed in other Abrahamic religions such as Islam. The Bible is an anthology (a compilation of texts of a variety of forms) originally writt ...

Language contact

Resígaro has many morphological borrowings from Bora, such as pronouns, number markings, and case markers. However, there are relatively few lexical loanwords.Seifart, Frank. 2011
Bora loans in Resígaro: Massive morphological and little lexical borrowing in a moribund Arawakan language
. ''Cadernos de Etnolingüística'' Série Monografias, 2.

Phonology

References

External links

Resígaro DoReCo corpus
compiled by Frank Seifart. Audio recordings of narrative texts, with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level and translations. Languages of Peru Arawakan languages {{Arawakan-lang-stub