Muran languages
Encyclopedia
Muran is a small language family
of Amazonas, Brazil
.
Most Muran languages, which were spoken by few people, have died out due to the recent expansion of Brazilian Portuguese
. Mura, Bohurá, and Yahahí are now extinct
, and little linguistic work was done on them before extinction. Pirahã, the one surviving Muran language, is now spoken by only 300 people in eight villages.
Linguistically, the Muran family is typified by agglutinativity, a very small number of phoneme
s (11 compared to over 40 in English
), and the use of tones
.
. Kaufman (1994) also suggests a connection with Huarpe (in his Macro-Warpean proposal).
Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...
of Amazonas, Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
.
Family division
Muran consists of 4 languages:- Mura †
- PirahãPirahã languagePirahã is a language spoken by the Pirahã. The Pirahã are an indigenous people of Amazonas, Brazil, living along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon....
( Pirahá, Pirahán) - BohuráBohura languageBohurá is an extinct Muran language of Amazonas, Brazil....
† - Yahahí †
Most Muran languages, which were spoken by few people, have died out due to the recent expansion of Brazilian Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
. Mura, Bohurá, and Yahahí are now extinct
Extinct language
An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers., or that is no longer in current use. Extinct languages are sometimes contrasted with dead languages, which are still known and used in special contexts in written form, but not as ordinary spoken languages for everyday communication...
, and little linguistic work was done on them before extinction. Pirahã, the one surviving Muran language, is now spoken by only 300 people in eight villages.
Linguistically, the Muran family is typified by agglutinativity, a very small number of phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s (11 compared to over 40 in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
), and the use of tones
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
.
Genealogical relations
Muran is often proposed to be related to MatanawíMatanawi language
Matanawi was a divergent Amazonian language that appears to be distantly related to the Muran languages....
. Kaufman (1994) also suggests a connection with Huarpe (in his Macro-Warpean proposal).
External links
- PROEL: Grupo Muran
- Ethnologue: Pirahã