Aikanã (sometimes called Tubarão, Corumbiara/Kolumbiara, or Huari/Uari/Wari) is an

endangered An endangered species is a species that is very likely to become extinct in the near future, either worldwide or in a particular political jurisdiction. Endangered species may be at risk due to factors such as habitat loss, poaching and inv ...

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 ...

spoken by about 200 Aikanã people in

Rondônia Rondônia () is one of the 26 states of Brazil, located in the northern subdivision of the country (central-western part). To the west is a short border with the state of Acre, to the north is the state of Amazonas, in the east is Mato Grosso ...

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 ...

. It is morphologically complex and has SOV word order. Aikanã uses the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greece, Greek city of Cumae, in southe ...

. The people live with speakers of Koaia (Kwaza).

Classification

Van der Voort (2005) observes similarities among Aikanã, Kanoê, and Kwaza, but believes the evidence is not strong enough to definitively link the three languages together as part of a single language family. Hence, Aikanã is best considered to be a

. 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 Aikanã and Kwaza. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance. Jolkesky (2016) also notes that there are lexical similarities with Kanoe, Kwaza, and Nambikwara due to contact.

Varieties

Varieties listed by Loukotka (1968): *Huari (Corumbiara) - spoken between the

Corumbiara River The Corumbiara River is a river of Rondônia state in western Brazil. See also *List of rivers of Rondônia List of rivers in Rondônia (Brazilian State). The list is arranged by drainage basin, with respective tributaries indented under each l ...

and Guarajú River, Rondônia *Masaca (Aicana) - spoken on the left bank of the

*Aboba - extinct language once spoken on the Guarajú River *Maba - extinct language once spoken on the Guajejú River (unattested) *Puxacaze - once spoken on the Guajejú River, Brazil (unattested) *Guajejú - once spoken at the sources of the Jamarí River and Candeia River (unattested)

Phonology

Vowels

* /y, ỹ/ can also be heard as close-mid �, ø̃ * /a, ã/ are heard as �, ɨ̃before /i, ĩ/.

Consonants

* Within the position of nasal vowels, sounds /b, d, d͡ð/ become

, n, ⁿ̪ð The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark () in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline o ...

and /w, ɾ, h/ become ̃, ɾ̃, h̃ * /t̪͡s, d͡ð/ are only heard as affricates ̪͡s, d͡ðin word-initial position. Elsewhere, they are heard as a fricatives and � * /w/ can be heard as a fricative �when before /i/. * /ɾ/ can also be heard as between vowels. * /d͡ʒ/ is heard as ͡ʒbefore a front-vowel, before a non-front vowel, and as �or ̃before a nasal vowel.

Vocabulary

Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items for Huari and Masaca, as well as Capixana. : Aikanã plant and animal names from Silva (2012)Silva, Maria de Fátima dos Santos da. 2012.
Dicionário de raízes da língua aikanã
'. M.A. dissertation, Universidade Federal de Rondônia, Guajará-Mirim campus.
PDF
are listed in the corresponding Portuguese article.

References

*Alain Fabre, 2005, ''Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos: AIKANA

{{DEFAULTSORT:Aikana Language Indigenous languages of Western Amazonia Languages of Brazil Language isolates of South America Endangered language isolates Subject–object–verb languages Mamoré–Guaporé linguistic area