Cahuapana languages
Cahuapana (also Kahuapana, Kawapana, Jebero, Xebero ) is a small indigenous language family from South America with only two individual languages that are spoken by around 9,000 people in northern Peru :
- Chayahuita [cbt] (also: Canpo Piyapi, Tshaawi; 7,000 speakers), dialects: Chayahuita, Cahuapana †
- Jebero [jeb] (also: Xebero, Xihuila; 2,000 speakers)
(Number of speakers according to Wise 1999)
Linguistic situation
The Cahuapana dialect of Chayahuita - after which the language unit was named - has died out. Of the Chayahuita speakers, 30% also speak Spanish; the children grow up with Chayahuita; Jebero is only spoken by older people and is no longer passed on to the younger generation (Wise 1999).
Kinship
As far as we know today, Cahuapana has no close relatives. It was inserted into the Andean branch of Amerindian by Joseph Greenberg (1987) . Campbell (1997) notes that this thesis is hardly supported by the material presented. Kaufman (1990) sees a possible connection between the Cahuapana and the Jívaro languages , which would be supported by some lexical data. Wise (1999) rejects a closer relationship between the Cahuapana and the Jivaro.
Linguistic characteristics
The Cahuapana languages are accusative languages with the basic word order subject-object-verb (SOV).
literature
- John T. Bendor-Samuel: The verbal piece in Jebero (= Word. Supplement to Word. Monograph. 4, ISSN 0459-4606 ). Clowes, London et al. 1961.
- Lyle Campbell : American Indian Languages. The Historical Linguistics of Native America (= Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics. 4). Oxford University Press, New York NY et al. 1997, ISBN 0-19-509427-1 .
- Joseph Harold Greenberg : Language in the Americas. Stanford University Press, Stanford CA 1987, ISBN 0-8047-1315-4 .
- Harald Haarmann : Small Lexicon of Languages. From Albanian to Zulu (= Beck series. 1432). Beck, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-406-47558-2 .
- Terrence Kaufman: Language history in South America: what we know and how to know more. In: Doris L. Payne (Ed.): Amazonian linguistics. Studies in lowland South American languages. University of Texas Press, Austin TX 1990, ISBN 0-292-70414-3 , pp. 13-74.
- Merritt Ruhlen : A Guide to the World's Languages. Volume 1: Classification. Arnold, London 1987, ISBN 0-7131-6503-0 (1st paperback edition, with a postscript on recent developments. Arnold, London 1991, ISBN 0-340-56186-6 ).
- Gloria Soto Valdivia: Léxico del grupo etnolingüístico chayahuita (Alto Amazonas, Loreto) . Centro Amazónico de Antropología y Aplicación Práctica, Lima 1983.
- Mary Ruth Wise: Small language families and isolates in Peru . In: Robert MW Dixon , Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (Eds.): The Amazonian Languages. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 1999, ISBN 0-521-57021-2 , pp. 307-340.