The Cabécar language is an indigenous American language of the
Chibchan language family spoken by the
Cabécar people in the inland
Turrialba Region,
Cartago Province,
Costa Rica
Costa Rica, officially the Republic of Costa Rica, is a country in Central America. It borders Nicaragua to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the northeast, Panama to the southeast, and the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, as well as Maritime bo ...
. As of 2007, 2,000 speakers were monolingual.
[ It is the only indigenous language in Costa Rica with monolingual adults.][ The language is also known by its dialect names Chirripó, Estrella, Telire, and Ujarrás.][
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History
Cabécar is considered to be one of a few "Chibcha-speaking tribes", categorized by similarities in the languages that they speak. Other Chibcha speaking tribes include the Bribri and the Boruca, also of Costa Rica. It is believed that the languages of the Chibcha speaking tribes shared a common ancestor around 8,000 years ago. However, differences in the languages are thought to have come about from the influence of outside people, including influences from Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area that begins in the southern part of North America and extends to the Pacific coast of Central America, thus comprising the lands of central and southern Mexico, all of Belize, Guatemala, El S ...
.
Geographic distribution
Cabécar is an endangered language spoken in Costa Rica. It is spoken by the Cabécar people, an indigenous group located near the Talamancan mountains of Costa Rica.
Dialects and varieties
There are two different dialects of Cabécar, each of which has more narrow dialects within it. One of these is spoken in the north, while the other is spoken in southern parts of Costa Rica.
Phonology
Cabécar uses a Latin alphabet with umlauts for (ë, ö), and tildes for (ã, ẽ, ĩ, õ, ũ).[Native-languages.org](_blank)
/ref> Cabécar has twelve vowels, five of which are nasalized.
Consonants
Vowels
Grammar
Cabécar has a canonical word order of subject–object–verb.[
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References
Resources
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External links
Recording of "2 children's chants of the Cabécar Indians"
from the Indigenous Languages of Costa Rica Collection of Laura Cervantes at AILLA.
Audio sampleNumeral list 1-20Christian Bible - Matthew 2Video of documentary of Cabecar songsVideo with audio and text of Christian hymn "Gloria" in CabecarInterview discussing work on Cabecar dictionary (in Spanish)
Cabécar DoReCo corpus
compiled by Juan Diego Quesada, Stavros Skopeteas, Carolina Pasamonik, Carolin Brokmann and Florian Fischer. Audio recordings of narrative texts with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level, translations, and time-aligned morphological annotations.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cabecar Language
Cabécar people
Subject–object–verb languages
Languages of Costa Rica
Cartago Province
Indigenous languages of Central America
Chibchan languages