Kashinawa (also spelled ''Kaxinawá, Kashinawa, Kaxynawa, Caxinawa, Caxinawá, and Cashinahua''), or Hantxa Kuin (''Hãtxa Kuĩ''), is an Indigenous American language of western South America which belongs to the
Panoan language family. It is spoken by about 1,600
Kaxinawá
The Huni Kuin (also known as: ''Kaxinawá'', ''Cashinahua'', ''Kaschinawa'', ''Kashinawa'', ''Caxinauás'') are an Indigenous people of Brazil and Indigenous peoples in Peru, Peru. Their villages are located along the Purus River, Purus and Cur ...
in Peru, along the Curanja and the
Purus Rivers, and in Brazil by 400 Kaxinawá in the state of
Acre
The acre ( ) is a Unit of measurement, unit of land area used in the Imperial units, British imperial and the United States customary units#Area, United States customary systems. It is traditionally defined as the area of one Chain (unit), ch ...
.
About five to ten percent of speakers have some Spanish language proficiency, while forty percent are literate and twenty to thirty percent are literate in Spanish as a second language.
Dialects are Brazilian Kashinawa, Peruvian Kashinawa, and the extinct Juruá Kapanawa (Capanahua of the Juruá River) and Paranawa.
Phonology
Vowels
* In final syllables, are heard as .
* can also be heard as mid-back .
*Although nasalization is generally marked by placing a
tilde
The tilde (, also ) is a grapheme or with a number of uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish , which in turn came from the Latin , meaning 'title' or 'superscription'. Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in ...
over the vowel, some authors choose to mark it with a following to denote that the previous vowel or contiguous vowels are nasalised.
Consonants
* The
stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases.
The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lip ...
d may be pronounced as an
alveolar flap
The voiced alveolar tap or flap is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based pri ...
when between two vowels, like the
North American English
North American English (NAmE) encompasses the English language as spoken in both the United States and Canada. Because of their related histories and cultures, plus the similarities between the pronunciations (accents), vocabulary, and grammar ...
pronunciation of in the word ''ladder''.
Dictionary
A dictionary has been compiled and published since 1980.
Diccionario Cashinahua Tomo 1
Biblioteca Virtual del Ministerio de Cultura. Retrieved 07 Oct. 2024
Orthography
The Roman alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from —additions su ...
is used. There is an interrogative punctuation mark different from the question mark.
Morphology
Articles and adjectives are placed after nouns. There are seven prefixes and five suffixes.
References
External links
Cashinahua Pronunciation and Spelling Guide
Native Languages of the Americas website. 1998-2008.
Diccionario Cashinahua Tomo 1
Wise, Mary Ruth. 1981. ''Diccionario Cashinahua''. Yarinacocha, Peru: Instituto Lingüístico del Verano.
Animacy and mythology in Hantxa Kuin (Cashinahua)
Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
* Kensinger, Kenneth M
The phonological hierarchy of Cashinahua (Pano)
Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of Oklahoma. 1963.
* Montag, Richard. 200
Participant Referencing in Cashinahua
SIL International.
Cashinahua DoReCo corpus
compiled by Sabine Reiter. Audio recordings of narrative texts with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level, translations, and - for some texts - time-aligned morphological annotations.
{{Authority control
Languages of Peru
Languages of Brazil
Panoan languages