Bribri, also known as Bri-bri, Bribriwak, and Bribri-wak, is a Chibchan language, from a

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in his ...

indigenous to the

Isthmo-Colombian Area The Isthmo-Colombian Area is defined as a cultural area encompassing those territories occupied predominantly by speakers of the Chibchan languages at the time of European contact. It includes portions of the Central American isthmus like eastern E ...

, which extends from eastern Honduras to northern Colombia and includes populations of those countries as well as

Nicaragua Nicaragua (; ), officially the Republic of Nicaragua (), is the largest Sovereign state, country in Central America, bordered by Honduras to the north, the Caribbean Sea, Caribbean to the east, Costa Rica to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to ...

, Costa Rica, and

Panama Panama ( , ; es, link=no, Panamá ), officially the Republic of Panama ( es, República de Panamá), is a transcontinental country spanning the southern part of North America and the northern part of South America. It is bordered by Co ...

. As of 2002, there were about 11,000 speakers left. An estimate by the National Census of Costa Rica in 2011 found that Bribri is currently spoken by 54.7% of the 12,785

Bribri The Bribri are an Indigenous people in eastern Costa Rica and northern Panama. Today, most Bribri people speak the Bribri language or Spanish. There are varying estimates from government officials of the group's population. Estimates of the ...

people, about 7,000 individuals. It is a tonal language whose

word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...

is subject–object–verb. There are three traditional dialects of Bribri: Coroma (in the western region of the

Talamanca mountain range The Cordillera de Talamanca is a mountain range that lies in the southeast half of Costa Rica and the far west of Panama. Much of the range and the area around it is included in La Amistad International Park, which also is shared between the tw ...

), Amubre (in the eastern region of the

) and Salitre (in the South Pacific area). ''Bribri'' is a tribal name, deriving from a word for "mountainous" in their own language. The Bribri language is also referred to as ''Su Uhtuk'', which means "our language." Bribri is reportedly most similar to sister language Cabécar as both languages have nasal harmony, but they are

mutually unintelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as a ...

Phonology

Consonants

* /b/ can have allophones of �, m * /d/ can have an allophone of � as well as nasal allophones of �̃, n * /ɟ͡ʝ/ can have an allophone of � * /ɾ/ can have an allophone of * /w, j/ can have nasalised allophones of ̃, j̃

Vowels

I, u and a are pronounced in the same manner as they would be in Spanish. E and o are more open than in Spanish. The sound of ë is between i and e, in the same manner as ö is between u and o. The nasal vowels are pronounced similarly to the corresponding orals, with the addition of some air exiting through the nose.

Alphabet

The Linguistics Department at the

University of Costa Rica The University of Costa Rica (Spanish: ''Universidad de Costa Rica,'' abbreviated UCR) is a public university in the Republic of Costa Rica, in Central America. Its main campus, Ciudad Universitaria Rodrigo Facio, is located in San Pedro M ...

has conceived a standardized spelling system that is based on several earlier attempts. Bribri skilt

Nasal vowels are indicated by a tilde: (Previously indicated with a macron below: a̱, e̱, i̱, o̱, u̱), except after a nasal consonant (already indicating nasalisation of the vowel). Tones are indicated by the grave accent for the high tone and the acute accent for the low tone; these can also be placed on the nasal vowels.

References

Bibliography

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External links

Portal de la lengua bribri. Bribri texts, audios and transcriptions, by Carla V. Jara and Alí García Segura

Bribri's entry on the WALS

A Bribri course with audio files: Jara Murillo, Carla con Alí García Segura. 2008. Materiales y Ejercicios para el Curso de Bribri I, Universidad de Costa Rica.

Recordings of Bribri conversations and narratives
from the Indigenous Languages of Costa Rica Collection of Laura Cervantes at

AILLA The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) is a digital repository housed in LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections at the University of Texas at Austin. AILLA is a digital language archive dedicated to the digit ...

. Bribri people Chibchan languages Languages of Costa Rica Tonal languages Subject–object–verb languages {{indigenousAmerican-lang-stub