Kulina (also Kulína, Kulyna, Culina, Curina, Corina, Korina, Culina-Madijá, Madijá, Madija, Madiha, Madihá) is an
Arawan language of
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
and
Peru
, image_flag = Flag of Peru.svg
, image_coat = Escudo nacional del Perú.svg
, other_symbol = Great Seal of the State
, other_symbol_type = National seal
, national_motto = "Firm and Happy f ...
spoken by about 4,000
Kulina people. With such few speakers, Kulina is considered a threatened language. Kulina is similar to the
Deni language, as they have even been considered different dialects of the same language. Both languages have
SOV word order SOV may refer to:
* SOV, Service Operations Vessel
* SOV, a former ticker symbol for Sovereign Bank
* SOV, a legal cryptocurrency created by the Sovereign Currency Act of 2018 of the Republic of the Marshall Islands
* SOV, the National Rail statio ...
, as well as three sets of alveolar
affricate consonants. It is believed the presence of the reconstructed phoneme ''*s'' in place of the fricative *s
h is indicative of the Kulina and Deni languages as opposed to other languages in the Arawan family.
History and Geography
The Kulina people traditionally live in the states of
Acre and
Amazonas in Brazil and the
Ucayali
The Ucayali River ( es, Río Ucayali, ) is the main headstream of the Amazon River. It rises about north of Lake Titicaca, in the Arequipa region of Peru and becomes the Amazon at the confluence of the Marañón close to Nauta city. The city ...
region in Peru.
In Acre and Ucayali, the villages are found along the Purus and Envira rivers. In Amazonas, the villages are around the Juruá, Tarauacá and Jutaí rivers.
Classification
Kulina is a member of the
Arawan language family.
According to Dienst (2014), it forms a Madihá
dialect continuum
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varie ...
with Western Jamamadi and Deni.
The term ''madihá'' means 'people' in all of these languages.
Grammar
The basic constituent order is
subject–object–verb
Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to:
Philosophy
*'' Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing
**Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective con ...
. It is predominantly a
head-marking
A language is head-marking if the grammatical marks showing agreement between different words of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads (or nuclei) of phrases, rather than on the modifiers or dependents. Many languages employ both head-marking ...
language with
agglutinative
In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...
morphology and some fusion.
Kulina is a
head-final
In linguistics, head directionality is a proposed parameter that classifies languages according to whether they are head-initial (the head of a phrase precedes its complements) or head-final (the head follows its complements). The head is the ...
language and contains many more
suffixes than
prefixes.
There are two
noun class
In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some a ...
es and two
genders and
agreement Agreement may refer to:
Agreements between people and organizations
* Gentlemen's agreement, not enforceable by law
* Trade agreement, between countries
* Consensus, a decision-making process
* Contract, enforceable in a court of law
** Meeting o ...
on
transitive verb
A transitive verb is a verb that accepts one or more objects, for example, 'cleaned' in ''Donald cleaned the window''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not have objects, for example, 'panicked' in ''Donald panicked''.
Transiti ...
s is determined by a number of complex factors, both syntactic and pragmatic.
In transitive sentences, the verb agree with the object in gender and with the subject in person and number. In
intransitive sentences, the verb agrees with its subject in person, number and gender.
Phonology
Consonants
Consonants sounds /pʰ, t̪, d͡z, t͡s, t͡sʰ, ɾ, β~w/ may also be pronounced as /ɸ~f, t͡ʃ, z~ɟ, s, sʰ~ʃ, l, v/.
Vowels
An
sound can also range to a sound. The
vowel sound only appears in diphthongs.
Bibliography
* Boyer, Cindy & Jim Boyer. 2000. ''Dictionario: (sic) Culina - Castellano.'' Unpublished Manuscript.
* Dienst, Stefan. 2014. ''A Grammar of Kulina''. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
* Dienst, Stefan. 2009.
Stative Verbs in Kulina. ''ReVel Revista Virtual de Estudos de Lingaugem.''
* Diesnt, Stefan. 2008a. "Portuguese Influence on Kulina". In Thomas Stolz, Dik Bakker & Rosa Salas Palomo (eds.) ''Aspects of language contact. New theoretical'', ''methodological and empirical findings with special focus on Romancisation processes'', 287-297. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
* Dienst, Stefan. 2008b. "Why Kulina doesn't have an antipassive". ''Amerindia'' 32: 27-36.
* Dienst, Stefan. 2005. "The innovation of s in Kulina and Deni". ''Anthropological Linguistics'' 52: 209-243.
* Monserrat, Ruth Maria Fonini & Abel O. Silva. 1986. ''Gramática da língua Kulina. Dialeto do Igarapé do Anjo''. Acre: Conselho Indigenista Missionário.
* Silva, Abel O. & Ruth M. F. Monserrat.1984. ''Dicionário Kulina – Português e Português – Kulina. (Dialeto do Igarapé do Anjo)''. Acre: Conselho Indigenista Missionário.
* Tiss, Frank. 2004. ''Gramática da língua Madiha (Kulina)''. São Leopoldo: Oikos.
* Wright, Pamela Sue. 1991. La hipótesis del inacusativo y los verbos mádija (culina). ''Revista Latino-americana de Estudios Ethnolingüísticos'' 6: 49-62.
* Wright, Pamela Sue. Madija predicates. ''Working Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics'', University of North Dakota 39: 93-140.
References
{{Languages of Peru
Arawan languages
Indigenous languages of Western Amazonia
Languages of Peru
Endangered Arawan languages
Subject–object–verb languages