Arabela is a nearly extinct indigenous American

language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

of the Zaparoan family spoken in two

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 ...

vian villages in tropical forest along the Napo tributary of the Arabela river. Also known as Chiripuno and Chiripunu, it is spoken by fewer than 50 people out of an ethnic population of about 400. Since there are so few speakers of Arabela left, its speakers speak either

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas **Spanish cuisine **Spanish history **Spanish culture ...

Quechua Quechua may refer to: *Quechua people, several Indigenous ethnic groups in South America, especially in Peru *Quechuan languages, an Indigenous South American language family spoken primarily in the Andes, derived from a common ancestral language ...

as a

second language A second language (L2) is a language spoken in addition to one's first language (L1). A second language may be a neighbouring language, another language of the speaker's home country, or a foreign language. A speaker's dominant language, which ...

. The

literacy rate Literacy is the ability to read and write, while illiteracy refers to an inability to read and write. Some researchers suggest that the study of "literacy" as a concept can be divided into two periods: the period before 1950, when literacy was ...

for Arabela as a

first language A first language (L1), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period hypothesis, critical period. In some countries, the term ''native language'' ...

is about 10–30%, and about 50–75% for a

. It uses a

SOV word order SOV may refer to: * 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 station code for Southend Victoria rail ...

. Like all native languages in

, it has an

official An official is someone who holds an office (function or Mandate (politics), mandate, regardless of whether it carries an actual Office, working space with it) in an organization or government and participates in the exercise of authority (eithe ...

status in areas where it is spoken. Artículo 48º Son idiomas oficiales el castellano y, en las zonas donde predominen, también lo son el quechua, el aimara y las demás lenguas aborígenes, según la ley.

The language and its speakers

Arabela is a language of the Zaparoan family of languages. Zaparoan tongues were once widely spoken in the

rain forest Rainforests are forests characterized by a closed and continuous tree Canopy (biology), canopy, moisture-dependent vegetation, the presence of epiphytes and lianas and the absence of wildfire. Rainforests can be generally classified as tropi ...

of north-eastern

, but Zaparoan-speaking people have been decimated by diseases, wars with neighboring native groups, and by quasi-enslavement during the

rubber boom The Amazon rubber cycle or boom (, ; , ) was an important part of the socioeconomic history of Brazil and Amazonian regions of neighboring countries, being related to the commercialization of rubber and the genocide of indigenous peoples. Cente ...

. Most Zaparoan communities have shifted to Lamas Quechua or

, while others have been incorporated into

Shuar The Shuar, also known as Jivaro, are an indigenous ethnic group that inhabits the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazonia. They are famous for their hunting skills and their tradition of head shrinking, known as Tzantsa. The Shuar language belongs to ...

groups. The few surviving Zaparoan languages are all severely endangered. Among those, Arabela is most closely related to Zaparo (the only one still spoken), Andoa and Conambo.

Current situation

The dominant languages of the area are

Kichwa Kichwa (, , also Spanish ) is a Quechuan language that includes all Quechua varieties of Ecuador and Colombia ('' Inga''), as well as extensions into Peru. It has an estimated half million speakers. Classification Kichwa belongs to the Nor ...

and

, and they are both widely spoken by Arabelas. Kichwa has been the default language for native communities in the area since the rubber boom era, and has spread through trade mixed marriages. It is, however, losing ground to Spanish in the younger generations. The use of Arabela is restricted to a small elderly fraction of the population. The language is official per the

Constitution of Peru The Political Constitution of the Republic of Peru (; Southern Quechua: ''Perú Suyu Hatun Kamay Pirwa 1993'') is the supreme law of Peru. The current constitution, enacted on 31 December 1993, is Peru's fifth in the 20th century and replaced t ...

New Testament The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus, as well as events relating to Christianity in the 1st century, first-century Christianit ...

in Arabela) was completed in 2008. A publication of select portions of the

Old Testament The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Isr ...

was completed in 2009. The language has been used in education by the Peruvian government, which has issued some school material in it. The

Universal Declaration of Human Rights The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an international document adopted by the United Nations General Assembly that enshrines the Human rights, rights and freedoms of all human beings. Drafted by a UN Drafting of the Universal D ...

has been translated into Arabela in 1988.

Dialectal divisions

There is no dialectal division among known Arabela speakers. A small group, called ''Pananuyuri'', separated from other Arabelas roughly a century ago. Their fate is unknown but they may have survived, in which case their dialect is likely to have somewhat diverged from the other speakers'.

Phonology

The Arabela phonemic inventory is quite typical for a Zaparoan language. It has five

places of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is an approximate location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a pa ...

and a vowel inventory of five

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

s common within the family.

Vowels

* /ɪ/ can also be heard as a nasal ��when in nasal positions. * /a/ can have allophones , æ, ɛ, ɔ, ʌ * /u/ can also be heard as �

Consonants

Morphology

The noun

Arabela has no

grammatical gender In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages wit ...

but for a few words, mostly describing persons, the sex can be specified by adding a suffix: *: 'my son' *: 'my daughter' Arabela has two

grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a Feature (linguistics), feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement (linguistics), agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and many other ...

s, singular and plural. The plural is generally added by adding a suffix to the singular, the nature of this suffix varying according to the pluralized word. *: 'house' yields : 'houses' *: 'woman' yields : 'women' *: 'unmarried girl' yields : 'unmarried girls' In a few cases, however, the plural can be formed through suffix substitution, or by using a different root altogether. *: 'man' yields '' *: 'group' yields '' *: 'mother' yields '' A number of other words form their plural by removing a singular specific suffix: *: 'stone' yields 'stone'

Pronouns

Arabela has a complex pronominal system, similar to those of other

Zaparoan languages Zaparoan (also Sáparoan, Záparo, Zaparoano, Zaparoana) is an endangered language family of Peru and Ecuador with fewer than 100 speakers. Zaparoan speakers seem to have been very numerous before the arrival of the Europeans. However, their grou ...

and distinguishes between active and passive personal pronouns. Active pronouns act as subjects in independent clauses and as objects in dependent ones.

Personal pronouns

Anaphoric pronouns

The verbal ending is used as an anaphoric. It can also mark the subject of a subordinate sentence when it refers to the object of the main sentence.

Demonstrative pronouns

Arabela has three kinds of

demonstrative pronoun Demonstratives ( abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic, their meaning depending on a particular fram ...

s: * indicates an object close to the speaker * indicates an object further away from the speaker (—is it what you want) * indicates a contrast between objects or persons (—this is my dog)

Interrogative pronouns

Arabela has a rather restricted of interrogative pronouns, composed of: * : who * : who (plural) * : what * : how, how much * : how * : where * : where from * : who, which

References

Bibliography

* Dicconario Arabela—Castellano, Rolland G. Rich, Instituto Lingüistico de Verano, Perú – 1999 * Rich, Furne. 1963. "Arabela Phonemes and High-Level Phonology," SPIL I, 193-206

External links

* *
Dicconario Arabella—Castellano, Rolland G. Rich, Instituto Lingüistico de Verano, Perú – 1999
{{DEFAULTSORT:Arabela Language Languages of Peru Zaparoan languages Subject–object–verb languages Endangered Indigenous languages of the Americas