Mawayana language

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Mawayana (Mahuayana), also known as Mapidian (Maopidyán), is a moribund Arawakan language of northern South America. It is spoken by a dozen elderly people living in ethnic Wai-wai and Tiriyó villages in Brazil and Suriname.^[4]

Classification[]

Aikhenvald (1999) lists Mawayana (and possibly Mawakwa as a dialect) together with Wapishana under a Rio Branco (North-Arawak) branch of the Arawakan family. Carlin (2006:314) notes that Mawayana "is closely related to Wapishana" and according to Ramirez (2001:530) they share at least 47% of their lexicon.

Phonology[]

Mawayana has, among its consonants, two implosives, /ɓ/ and /ɗ/, and what has been described as a "retroflex fricativised rhotic", represented with ⟨rž⟩, that it shares with Wapishana. The vowel systems contains four vowels (/i-e, a, ɨ, u-o/), each of which has a nasalised counterpart.^[5]

Consonants[]

Vowels[]

Mawayana vowel phonemes:^[4]

i	ɨ	u
e
a

Vowels have both nasal and length contrast.

Morphology[]

Mawayana personal affixes:^[4]

	singular	plural
1	n-/m- -na	wa- -wi
2	ɨ-/i- -i	ɨ- -wiko
3	ɾ(ɨ/iʔ)- -sɨ	na- -nu
3 refl.	a-

Mawayana verbal affixes:^[4]

thematic	-ta, -ɗa, -ɓa
present	-e
reciprocal	-(a)ka
adjectival	-ɾe, -ke

Morphosyntax[]

Mawayana has a polysynthetic morphology, mainly head-marking and with suffixes, although there are pronominal prefixes. The verbal arguments are indexed on the verb through subject suffixes on intransitive verbs, while agent prefixes and object suffixes on transitive verbs (Carlin 2006:319).

Notes[]

References[]

• Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (1999). "The Arawak language family". In Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.; Dixon, R.M.W. (eds.). The Amazonian languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 65–106.
• Carlin, Eithne B (2006). "Feeling the need. The borrowing of Cariban functional categories into Mawayana (Arawak)". In Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.; Dixon, R.M.W. (eds.). Grammars in contact: A cross-linguistic typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Carlin, Eithne B (2011). "Nested identities in the Southern Guyana-Surinam corner". In Hornborg, Alf; Hill, Jonathan D. (eds.). Ethnicity in ancient Amazonia: Reconstructing past identities from archaeology, linguistics, and ethnohistory. University Press of Colorado. pp. 225–236.
• Carlin, Eithne B; Boven, Karin (2002). "The native population: Migration and identities". In Carlin, Eithne B.; Arends, Jacques (eds.). Atlas of the languages of Suriname. KITLV Press. pp. 11–45.
• Carlin, Eithne B; Mans, Jimmy (2013). "Movement through time in the southern Guianas: deconstructing the Amerindian kaleidoscope". In Carlin, Eithne B.; Leglise, Isabelle; Migge, Bettina; et al. (eds.). In and out of Suriname: Language, mobility, and identity. Caribbean Series. Leiden: Brill.
• Ramirez, Henri (2001). Línguas Arawak da Amazônia setentrional (in Portuguese). Manaus: Universidade Federal do Amazonas.