Irántxe (''Irántxe, Iranxe, Iranshe'') /iˈɻɑːntʃeɪ/, also known as Mỹky (''Münkü'') or still as Irántxe-Münkü, is an indigenous language spoken by the Irántxe (''Iránxe, Iranche, Manoki, Munku'') and Mỹky (''Mynky, Münkü, Munku, Menku, Kenku, Myy'') peoples in the state of

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 ...

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 ...

. Recent descriptions of the language analyze it as a

language isolate Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The nu ...

, in that it "bears no similarity with other language families" (Arruda 2003). Monserrat (2010) is a well-reviewed grammar of the language.

Vitality and dialects

According to the

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international coope ...

br>Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
Irántxe-Mỹky is currently not thriving. While the Mỹky dialect is considered "vulnerable", the Irántxe variety is deemed "considerably endangered", with only 10 fluent speakers out of the 356 ethnic Irántxe-Mỹky in the 2006 report. As of 2011, the 280 Irántxe have largely assimilated to Brazilian culture. Most are monolingual in Portuguese, and the remaining Irántxe speakers are over 50 years old. A splinter group, the Mỹky, however, moved to escape assimilation, and were isolated until 1971. As of 2011, there were 80 ethnic Mỹky, all of whom spoke the language. Dialects and location:Monserrat, Ruth Maria Fonini and Elizabeth R. Amarante. 1995. ''Dicionário Mỹky-Português''. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Sepeei/SR-5/UFRJ. 48 f. *Irántxe dialect: spoken in Cravari village, on the Cravari River (a tributary of the Do Sangue River) in the municipality of Diamantino, Mato Grosso. *Mỹky dialect: spoken at an isolated village at the headwaters of the Escondido Creek, in the municipality of Brasnorte, Mato Grosso state.

Language contact

Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with languages from the

Arawak The Arawak are a group of indigenous peoples of northern South America and of the Caribbean. Specifically, the term "Arawak" has been applied at various times to the Lokono of South America and the Taíno, who historically lived in the Greate ...

, Tupi, Chapakura-Wañam, Nambikwara, and

Yanomami The Yanomami, also spelled Yąnomamö or Yanomama, are a group of approximately 35,000 indigenous people who live in some 200–250 villages in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Venezuela and Brazil. Etymology The ethnonym ''Yanomami' ...

families, likely due to contact. An automated computational analysis ( ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013.
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'. also found lexical similarities between Irántxe-Mỹky and Nambikwaran.

Phonology

No instrumental phonetic data pertaining to the Irántxe-Mỹky language is available. The phonological description of Inrátxe-Mỹky is based on auditory analyses by the authors cited.

Consonants

Irántxe-Mỹky has a small

consonant inventory In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...

. Voicing is not contrastive for any consonant. In the Monserrat analysis shown in the table, there is a series of palatalized stops /pʲ tʲ kʲ/ and nasals /mʲ nʲ/, which reviewer D’Angelis (2011) analyzes as /Cj/ sequences. In Monserrat's analysis, /ʃ/ is a separate phoneme from /sʲ/.

Allophonic variation

* The bilabial /m/ may occur as bword initially, especially among the Irántxe: ''muhu'' buhu ''mjehy'' bʲɛhɨ * The sibilant /s/ is pronounced �before /j/. * The trill /r/ may also occur as * The palatal approximant /j/ occurs as �before nasal vowels.

Vowels

The vowel inventory of Irántxe-Mỹky is large, with 21 phonemic vowels.

Vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word ...

and

nasalization In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internation ...

are contrastive in the language. The role of tone is not clear. In many words, /ə/ alternates with /ɛ/. The maximal

syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological ...

shape may be CVC or CjVC word-medially, depending on the analysis. Word-finally, only CV ~ CʲV syllables occur.

Orthography

The linguist Ruth Monserrat, along with native speaker Beth Jurusi, developed a system for spelling the Mỹky dialect.

Lexicon

Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items for the Irántxe dialect, later expanded in Holanda's (1960) larger vocabulary list.Holanda Pereira, Adalberto. 1960. Vocabulário da língua dos índios irántxe. ''Revista de Antropologia'' 12:105-115. The Mỹky words derive from the dictionary compiled by Monserrat. :