Pirahã (also spelled Pirahá, Pirahán), or Múra-Pirahã, is the indigenous language of the Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. The Pirahã live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon River. Pirahã is estimated to have between 250 and 380 speakers. It is not in immediate danger of extinction, as its use is vigorous and the Pirahã community is mostly monolingual.
The Pirahã language is the subject of various controversial claims: for example, that it provides evidence against linguistic relativity. The controversy is compounded by the difficulty of learning the language; the number of linguists with field experience in Pirahã is very small. Consequently, many claims which identify Pirahã as exhibiting features contradictory to the most normative understanding of human language cognition have not as of yet engendered considerable confidence.
Classification Pirahã is the only surviving dialect of the Mura language, all others having died out in the last few centuries as most groups of the Mura people have shifted to Portuguese. Pirahã can therefore be considered its own language now. Suspected relatives, such as Matanawi, are also extinct. +Mura and Pirahã vocabularyglossMuraPirahãlongpeissípiiʔishortkutjúhikoihíbigitokúiitohí
Name Speakers refer to their language as , and to their own ethnic group as .
Knowledge of other languages Daniel Everett states that most of the remaining Pirahã speakers are monolingual, knowing only a few words of Portuguese. The anthropologist Marco Antônio Gonçalves, who lived with the Pirahã for 18 months over several years, writes that most of the men understand Portuguese, though not all of them are able to express themselves in the language. Women have little understanding of Portuguese and never use it as a form of expression. The men developed a contact 'language' or pidgin that allowed them to communicate with regional populations, mixing words from Pirahã, Portuguese and Nheengatu, the Amazonian General Language.
Everett states that the Pirahã use a very rudimentary Portuguese lexicon with Pirahã grammar when speaking Portuguese and that their Portuguese is so limited to very specific topics that they are rightly called monolingual, without contradicting Gonçalves (since they can communicate on a very narrow range of topics using a very restricted lexicon). Future research on developing bilingualism (Pirahã-Portuguese) in the community, along the lines of Sakel and Gonçalves, will provide valuable data for the discussion on speakers' grammatical competence (e.g. regarding the effect of culture). Although Gonçalves quotes whole stories told by the Pirahã, Everett has claimed that the Portuguese in these stories is not a literal transcription of what was said, but a free translation from the pidgin Portuguese of the Pirahã.
In a 2012 study, Jeanette Sakel studied the use of Portuguese by a group of Pirahã speakers and reported that, when speaking Portuguese, most Pirahã speakers employ simple syntactic constructions, but some more proficient speakers utilize constructions that could be analysed as complex constructions, such as subordinating conjunctions and complement clauses.
Phonology
The Pirahã language is one of the phonologically simplest languages known, comparable to Rotokas (New Guinea) and the Lakes Plain languages such as Obokuitai. There is a claim that Pirahã has as few as ten phonemes, one fewer than Rotokas, or even as few as nine for women, but this requires analyzing as an underlying and having /h/ invariably substituted for /s/ in female speech. Although such a phenomenon is odd cross-linguistically, Ian Maddieson has found in studying Pirahã data that does indeed exhibit an unusual distribution in the language.
When languages have inventories as small and allophonic variation as great as in Pirahã and Rotokas, different linguists may have very different ideas as to the nature of their phonological systems.
Tone The tone-bearing unit in Pirahã is the mora. The "ten-phoneme" claim also does not consider the tones of Pirahã, at least two of which are phonemic (marked by an acute accent and either unmarked or marked by a grave accent in Daniel Everett's works), bringing the number of phonemes to at least twelve. According to Steven N. Sheldon there are three tones, high (¹), mid (²) and low (³). Silva (2014) posits four phonemic tones in Pirahã, two level tones, high and low, and two contour tones, rising and falling, the latter of which are produced when morae of differing tones follow the other.
Pirahã can be whistled, hummed, or encoded in music. In fact, Keren Everett believes that current research on the language misses much of its meaning by paying little attention to the language's prosody. Consonants and vowels may be omitted altogether and the meaning conveyed solely through variations in pitch, stress, and rhythm. She says that mothers teach their children the language through constantly singing the same musical patterns.John Colapinto (2007), "The Interpreter". The New Yorker, 2007-04-16
Vowels Front Back Close Open Sequences of two vowels are bimoraic and therefore have two tone-bearing units; thus, each unit has its own level tone.
Consonants The segmental phonemes are presented in the following table. Phonemes not universally recognized as such are in (parentheses). LabialCoronalDorsalGlottalStopvoiceless() voicedContinuant()() The glottal stop is inserted predictably at the start of a word. Salles (2023) also treats the two glides as phonemic. Everett posits that is an allophone of the sequence . Women sometimes use instead of .
The number of phonemes is at most thirteen, matching Hawaiian, if is counted as a phoneme and there are just two tones; if is not phonemic, there are twelve phonemes, one more than the number found in Rotokas, or eleven among women who uniformly replace with . (English, by comparison, has thirty to forty-five, depending on dialect.) However, many of the phonemes show a great deal of allophonic variation. + Pirahã consonants with example words Phoneme Phone Word "otter" "sand" before "residue" "macaw" "macaw" "down (noun)" initially "throat, neck" before kaoáíbogi "evil spirit" "inga (fruit)" initially "can (noun)" (see below) "hoe" "should not" before "fat (noun)" "bird arrow"
For instance, vowels are nasalized after the glottal consonants and (written h and x). Also, : the nasal after a pause, the trill before . It is argued by Everett that the latter is only produced "around people whom the speaker is familiar". : the nasal (an apical alveolar nasal) after a pause; is an alveolar–labiolingual lateral 'double flap' that has only been reported for this language, where the tongue strikes the alveolar ridge and then strikes the lower lip; it is a phonetic cluster that has "two, non-contiguous, non-simultaneous points of articulation.", p. 94: "Due to the fact that [l̨̃] is apparently sui generis it was necessary to synthesize various terms in the literature (especially from Catford 1968 and Pike 1943) in order to describe this segment in scientifically accurate manner. The resultant characterization of [l̨̃] is: a voiced, lateralized apical-alveolar/sublaminal-labial double flap with egressive lung air. In the formation of this sound (see Fig. 1) the tongue tip touches the alveolar ridge and comes out of the mouth, almost touching the upper chin as the underblade of the tongue touches the lower lip.", p. 316: "Another allophone of g, [l͏̧̌], has been documented more completely in Everett (1982b). This allophone is a double apico-alveolar/sublamino-labial egressive vibrant. To my knowledge, this segment occurs in no other language. The vibrant allophones are perhaps best characterized as 'nonsuperstrate'." However, it is only used in certain special types of speech performances and so might not be considered a normal speech sound. Everett also claims that the latter is only produced "around people whom the speaker is familiar". : occurs as before and other vowels more frequently in women's speech than men's. : in men's speech, word-initial and are interchangeable. For many people, and may be exchanged in some words. The sequences and are said to be in free variation with and , at least in some words.
Because of its variation, Everett states that is not a stable phoneme. By analyzing it as , he is able to theoretically reduce the number of consonants to seven (or six for women with constant /h/-substitution).
Phonotactics Syllables in Pirahã are, according to Salles (2023), in the shape of (C)V(V)(G), where C is a wildcard symbol for any consonant, V for any vowel, and G for any glide (i.e. ). The only consonants other than glides which may be found in the coda position is in the animal classifier , which becomes preceding another word beginning in a consonant. Complex onsets do not occur. The sequence is not documented in Pirahã.
Typology Everett, over the course of more than two dozen papers and one book about the language, has ascribed various surprising features to it, including: One of the smallest phoneme inventories of any known language and a correspondingly high degree of allophonic variation, including one very rare sound, , an alveolar–labiolingual lateral 'double flap'. It is reported to be used as a phone in only this language. An extremely limited clause structure, not allowing for nested recursive sentences like "Mary said that John thought that Henry was fired". No abstract color words other than terms for light and dark (though this is disputed). The entire set of personal pronouns appears to have been borrowed from Nheengatu, a Tupi-based lingua franca. Although there is no documentation of a prior stage of Pirahã, the close resemblance of the Pirahã pronouns to those of Nheengatu makes this hypothesis plausible.
Daniel Everett claims that the absence of recursion in the language, if real, falsifies the basic assumption of modern Chomskyan linguistics. This claim is contested by many linguists, who claim that recursion has been observed in Pirahã by Daniel Everett himself, while Everett argues that those utterances that superficially seemed recursive to him at first were misinterpretations caused by his earlier lack of familiarity with the language. Furthermore, some linguists, including Chomsky himself, argue that even if Pirahã lacked recursion, that would have no implications for Chomskyan linguistics.
Syntax
Pronouns The basic Pirahã personal pronouns are: "I, we" or "you" "they (sg. or pl), this"
These can be serially combined: or to mean "we" (inclusive and exclusive), and to mean "you (plural)", or combined with 'all', as in "we (all) go".
There are several other pronouns reported, such as 'she', 'it' (animal), 'it' (aquatic animal), and 'it' (inanimate), but these may actually be nouns, and they cannot be used independently the way the three basic pronouns can. The fact that different linguists come up with different lists of such pronouns suggests that they are not basic to the grammar. In two recent papers, Everett cites Sheldon as agreeing with his (Everett's) analysis of the pronouns.
According to Sheldon, this is the list of pronouns: Pirahã English "I" "you" (sing.) "he" (human) "she" (human) "it", "they" (land animals) "it", "they" (water animals) "it", "they" (inanimate objects) "we" "you" (pl.) "they" (human?)
Pronouns are prefixed to the verb, in the order SUBJECT-INDOBJECT-OBJECT where INDOBJECT includes a preposition "to", "for", etc. They may all be omitted, e.g., "he will send you to me".
For possession, a pronoun is used in apposition (zero-marking):
Thomason & Everett note the pronouns are formally close to those of the Tupian languages Nheengatu and Tenharim, which the Mura had once used as contact languages:
PronounNheengatuTenharimPirahã ; clitic /i-/ (3fs), (3.human)