The Pekodian languages are a subgroup of the

Cariban The Cariban languages are a Language family, family of languages indigenous to northeastern 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 ...

language family. The languages are spoken in

Mato Grosso Mato Grosso ( – lit. "Thick Bush") is one of the states of Brazil, the third largest by area, located in the Central-West region. The state has 1.66% of the Brazilian population and is responsible for 1.9% of the Brazilian GDP. Neighboring ...

and

Pará Pará is a Federative units of Brazil, state of Brazil, located in northern Brazil and traversed by the lower Amazon River. It borders the Brazilian states of Amapá, Maranhão, Tocantins (state), Tocantins, Mato Grosso, Amazonas (Brazilian state) ...

states of Brazil and make up the southernmost branch of Cariban.Carvalho, Fernando O. de (2020)
Tocantins Apiaká, Parirí and Yarumá as Members of the Pekodian Branch (Cariban)
''Revista Brasileira de Línguas Indígenas - RBLI''. Macapá, v. 3, n. 1, p. 85-93, 2020. Meira and Chousou-Polydouri (2015) consider Pekodian to have descended from Cariban migrations that came from the north, as Cariban linguistic diversity is concentrated in northern South America.Meira S, Birchall J, Chousou-Polydouri S. 2015.
A character-based internal classification of the Cariban family
'. Talk presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguisticae Europaea, Leiden, Netherlands, Sept. 4. The term ''Pekodian'' was coined in 2005 by Meira and Bruna Franchetto on the basis of a cognate word for ‘woman’ found in these languages, respectively Bakairi ''pekodo'' and Ikpeng ''petkom'', but not found in any of the other Cariban languages compared against them.Meira, Sérgio and Bruna Franchetto. 2005. “The southern Cariban languages and the Cariban family.” in ''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 71, pages 127-192.

Languages

The Pekodian languages are:Meira, Sérgio. 2006
A família lingüística Caribe (Karíb)
''Revista de Estudos e Pesquisas'' v.3, n.1/2, p.157-174. Brasília: FUNAI.
PDF
Gildea, Spike. 2012. "Linguistic studies in the Cariban family", in Campbell & Grondona, eds, ''The Indigenous Languages of South America: A Comprehensive Guide''. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.Jolkesky, Marcelo Pinho De Valhery. 2016.
Estudo arqueo-ecolinguístico das terras tropicais sul-americanas
'. Ph.D. dissertation,

University of Brasília The University of Brasília ( pt, Universidade de Brasília, UnB) is a federal public university in Brasília, the capital of Brazil. It was founded in 1960 and has since consistently been named among the top five Brazilian universities and the ...

. * Bakairi *

Ikpeng The Ikpeng (also known as Txikāo) are an indigenous community that now lives in the Xingu Indigenous Park in Mato Grosso, Brazil. They had a population of 459 in 2010, up from a low of 50 in 1969. Name The Ikpeng are also called Txicão, Txikão ...

* Pará Arára * Yarumá (Suyá) * Amonap (Kuikuro–Kalapalo, Matipuhy)

Internal classification

Carvalho classifies the Pekodian languages as follows. ;Pekodian branch * Bakairí *''Kampot'' dialect cluster **

** Arára ** Apiaká do Tocantins ** Parirí ** Yarumá The term ''Kampot'' is coined by Carvalho (2020) from the lexical innovation *kampot ‘fire’ defining the dialect cluster.

Sound changes

A number of sound changes are shared between Bakairí and Ikpeng: * In

intervocalic In phonetics and phonology, an intervocalic consonant is a consonant that occurs between two vowels. Intervocalic consonants are often associated with lenition, a phonetic process that causes consonants to weaken and eventually disappear entirel ...

position,

Proto-Cariban The Cariban languages are a family of languages indigenous to northeastern 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 pockets ...

*p becomes w, *t becomes d (further developing to r in Ikpeng), and *k becomes g. * Proto-Cariban *r becomes l in certain (as-yet undetermined) shared environments. * Proto-Cariban *w becomes p word-initially (though there are some exceptions in Ikpeng). * Proto-Cariban *t palatalizes to tʃ before e and i. (Bakairí further develops tʃ to ʃ, ʒ, s, or z.) * Possibly, the Proto-Cariban sequence *nu-ru reduced to *n-ru, yielding Bakairí nu and Ikpeng ŋ-ru, although these results can also be explained in other ways.

Loanwords

Pekodian languages have various loanwords from non-Cariban languages, including Juruna and

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 ...

languages. Pekodian may have also influenced Bororoan and other non-Cariban language families.

References

{{Authority control Cariban languages