Warao (language)

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Warao

Spoken in

Venezuela , Guyana , Suriname
speaker approx. 18,000 (as of 1993)
Linguistic
classification
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

?

ISO 639 -2

?

ISO 639-3

wba

Approximate distribution area of ​​the Warao language

The Warao is an indigenous language of South America , spoken by the Warao in the Orinoco Delta and the adjacent areas of northeast Venezuela and Guyana . The Warao speakers are the indigenous people of the delta and have inhabited the area for at least 9,000 years.

Language area and speaker

It is estimated that there are around 30,000 Warao living today, and the number is rising. The Warao are the second largest Indian group in Venezuela, a country in which about 1.5% of Indians live. The language therefore has the status of a minority language .

According to the latest reliable census, 90% of the Venezuelan Warao speak the Warao language and 48% of them are bilingual in Warao and Spanish . In the central delta, the region where Capuchin missionaries have been running boarding schools since the 1930s, the proportion of Warao who no longer use their language in everyday dealings with one another is higher than in the western delta. In particular, speakers who have emigrated to the slums of the district capitals Tucupita and Barrancas are increasingly giving up the language, as they expect the use of Spanish to be of social benefit to their children in particular.

The approximately 1,000 Warao in Guyana all live in close contact with non-Indians and all speak English . Many of them are bilingual in Warao and English, not a few even trilingual in Warao, English and Spanish. Here too, however, the tendency to give up the Warao is reported.

The Warao language as the language of an oral culture

Like all Amerindian languages, the Warao is the language of an oral culture. This means that the Warao did not produce a written culture , even if oral texts of the Warao were transcribed by missionaries and ethnologists and published in print. The oral cultures of South America are closely related to storytelling and the performing arts, and they have a very rich oral literature .

Among other things, this includes different language styles and genres for the Warao. A main difference from Warao stories is the difference between denobo ( deje nobo "old stories"), the stories from mythological times and the deje jiro ("new stories") or deje kwamotane abane ("stories from above"). The latter include everyday narratives , gossip and funny stories about our genre of jokes sector.

The Warao also knows a ritual secret language that is used during important religious rituals or in the healing and damaging chants of the shamans . The lament, which is largely sung by women of the deceased's relatives, is a separate form of language that is hardly understood by outsiders.

Social and political status of the Warao language

Currently, the majority of the Warao speakers live in pure Warao villages, where the language is often the only means of communication between the Warao. But outside of the villages, in the district towns and the administration and even in school education in Warao areas, the Warao language has basically not been able to conquer a place to this day.

For Guyana there have not yet been any bilingual teaching projects (Forte 2000). In Venezuela, the legal basis for this was created in the early 1980s, but the so-called "REIB" (Régimen de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe) has not yet been able to establish itself due to a lack of political support. The current government of Hugo Chavez Frías has started a wide-ranging literacy program that penetrates into the Warao villages, but this is also in Spanish. After all, in the course of establishing a new Venezuelan identity, he upgraded the country's Amerindian cultures, declared their languages ​​to be official languages ​​and had the constitution translated into them.

Overall, like almost all Amerindian languages, the Warao is exposed to strong assimilation pressure from national society, and its future is therefore difficult to foresee.

Regional variants of the Warao language

Just as “the Warao” do not exist as a homogeneous cultural group, one cannot speak of a uniform Warao language either. Oral languages ​​do not have any written standardization through binding grammars or dictionaries, even if such works exist as a description of certain variants. Above all, the Warao, which is spoken in the central delta, was taken into account here. Some scientific authors simply deny the existence of regional variants, others speak of negligible differences. There is no reliable study on this. Most researchers assume at least 4 different main groups of the Warao culture and language. The Warao themselves go so far as to claim that they cannot understand speakers from certain other Warao groups.

Language structure

Typology of the Warao

Today it is no longer possible to prove that the Warao belongs to a larger language family . One speaks therefore of an "isolated" language (Weisshar 1982) that is not related to any other living or documented language. However, the Warao has certain structural similarities with other Amerindian languages, similar to the Sprachbund phenomenon, as it was described for the Balkan languages .

According to a common classification scheme in linguistics , the Warao is called "agglutinating language" . Languages ​​of this type are found all over the world, an example would be Turkish. In the case of agglutinating languages, words can ideally be broken down into individual word parts that are attached to one another like the wagons of a train and each convey a lexical or grammatical meaning. Most of the Warao affixes are suffixes , so they come after the root of the word, but there are also some prefixes .

Parts of speech

Unlike what one is used to in German , it is difficult to clearly distinguish the categories of adjectives and nouns, as well as verbs, although most grammar writers do this by applying the Latin grammar model to the Warao (missionary linguistics), so there is for example so-called noun-verbs “noun-verbs”, stems that function as nouns or verbs, depending on whether they are with a verbal suffix or a noun suffix.

Times, aspects and modalities

The Warao is characterized by a great variety of different tenses, aspects and modalities, which are mostly expressed by suffixes on the verb. The function that conjunctions take on in our language is also fulfilled by auxiliary verbs with such endings. For example, “as” literally means “so-being” ( takore ) in Warao.

More suffixes

In addition to affixes that change individual words, there are also affixes in Warao that affect a whole sentence. For example, the suffix -yama , which corresponds to our quotation marks in verbatim speech and indicates that the speaker only knows the facts from hearsay.

Person, number and plurality of the action

In Warao, the person of the doer or the object of the action need not be expressed in terms of the verb. Although there are independent personal pronouns and some clitical appended forms, these are not mandatory. Instead, the verb can be marked to indicate whether an action is / has been performed once or more often. The plural aspect indicates that the action was carried out either by one person several times or by several people once. Even with nouns, the plural does not have to be marked. The suffix -tuma , which is treated as plural in many works on the Warao, is actually a so-called "generic plural" and denotes "X and the associated things / people". For example “Waraotuma”: the Warao and theirs.

Ownership notice and article

The construction that indicates ownership in the Warao looks like this:

Possessing + possessing prefix + possessed: Lora ahoru (Lora a-horu) literally means: "Lora her-pot: Lora's pot".

There is no definite or indefinite article as we are used to from German. Instead, the personal suffixes used in ownership constructions are often used to indicate that an object is a definite object. The expression "his older sister" in the middle of the text without the possessing person would then have to be translated as: "the older sister".

Sentence structure

In the German language one is used to a freer sentence structure than in other languages ​​such as English. The Warao also has great freedom in its sentence structure. Not only in relation to the position of the parts of the sentence, but also in relation to the constituents of the sentence, which must be used. What makes it difficult for non-native speakers to understand especially mythological texts is a valued stylistic device of storytelling for native speakers. Even the scientists do not agree on what should be considered the basic word order in the Warao. Some state this with SOV (subject-object-verb) (Osborn 1966b), others consider OSV (object-subject-verb) to be the basic one (Romero-Figeroa 1997). At least one can say that Warao is a language in which the verb is at the end.

As in many, if not most, languages ​​in the world, a copula is not necessary in Warao. Sentences like: "the house is big" can be easily expressed with hanoko urida "house big".

As already said, subject and object of the verb do not necessarily have to be expressed and are usually understood from the context, once they have been introduced. There are stylistic reasons for this omission. To avoid misunderstandings, nouns that designate people can be marked as “non-subject” of the sentence by adding the suffix -si / -ma / -to , depending on the word .

swell

  1. ↑ Venezuela: Censo Indígena de Venezuela 1992 , Volume I, Caracas: OCEI (Oficina Central de Estadística e Informática) 1993.
  2. ↑ Janette Forte: Amerindian Languages ​​of Guyana In: F. Queixalós and O. Renault-Lescure (ed.): As línguas amazonicas hoje , Instituto Socioambiental, Sao Paulo 2000.
  3. ^ Johannes Wilbert: Folk Literature of the Warao Indians. Narrative Material and Motive Content Latin American Center University of California, Los Angeles 1970.
  4. ↑ Julio Perez Lavandero (ed.): I Ajotejana, Mitos , Hermanos Capuchinos, Caracas 1991.
  5. ↑ Julio Perez Lavandero (ed.): II Ajotejana, Relatos Hermanos Capuchinos, Caracas 1992.
  6. ^ Charles L. Briggs: The Pattering of Variation in Performance In: Dennis R. Preston (Ed.): American dialect Research , Benjamin, Amsterdam 1993.
  7. ↑ María E. Villalón: Educación para indígenas en Venezuela: Una crítica razonada CEVIAP, Caracas 1994.
  8. ↑ Andrés Romero-Figeroa: A Reference Grammar of Warao Lincom, Munich / Newcastle., 1997
  9. ^ Henry Osborn: Warao I: Phonology and Morphophonemics In: IJAL , No. 32, 1966.
  10. ↑ Emmerich Weisshar: The position of the Warao and Yanomama in relation to the indigenous languages ​​of South America north of the Amazon: Studies on the genetic and area-typological classification . University of Tübingen (dissertation), 1982.
  11. ↑ (own field research)
  12. ^ Henry Osborn: Warao III: Verbs and Suffixes In: IJAL , No. 33, 1967.

literature

  • Fr Antonio Vaquero: Idioma Warao. Morfología, sintaxis, literatura . Estudios Venezolanos Indígenas, Caracas 1965.

Web links