Tuyuca is an Eastern Tucanoan

Tucanoan languages

Tucanoan is a language family of Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru.-Family division:There are two dozen Tucanoan languages:*Western Tucanoan**Correguaje **Tama **Macaguaje ...

 language (similar to Tucano

Tucano language

Tucano is a Tucanoan language spoken in Amazonas, Brazil and Colombia.Many speakers of the endangered Tariana language are switching to Tucano.-Bibliography:* Campbell,...

) spoken by the Tuyuca people. The Tuyuca are an indigenous ethnic group of some 500-1000 people who inhabit the watershed of the Papuri

Papuri River

Papurí River is a river in South America. It emerges in the Vaupés Department of Colombia and flows east, forming part of the international boundary between Colombia and the Amazonas state of Brazil. On the border, it flows into the Uaupés River.-References:...

, Inambú and Tiquié rivers in the Colombian department of Vaupés

Vaupés Department

Vaupés is a department of Colombia in the jungle covered Amazonas Region. It is located in the southeast part of the country, bordering Brazil to the east, the department of Amazonas to the south, Caquetá and Guaviare, and Guainía to the north covering a total area of 54,135 km²...

 and the Brazilian state of Amazonas.

Grammar

Tuyuca is a postpositional agglutinative

Agglutinative language

An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view...

 SOV language with mandatory type II evidentiality

Evidentiality

In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and/or what kind of evidence exists. An evidential is the particular grammatical element that indicates evidentiality...

. Five evidentiality paradigms are used: visual, nonvisual, apparent, secondhand, and assumed, though secondhand evidentiality exists only in the past tense and apparent evidentiality does not appear in the first person present tense. The language is estimated to have 50 to 140 noun class

Noun class

In linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, but counting a given noun among nouns of such or another class is often clearly conventional...

es.

Phonetics & Phonology

The consonants in Tuyuca are /ptkbdɡsrwjh/ and the vowels are /iɨueao/, plus syllable nasalization

Nasalization

In phonetics, nasalization is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth...

 and phonemic stress.

Vowels

	Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...	Central Central vowel A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a central vowel is that the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel...	Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...
High	i	ɨ	u
Mid Mid vowel A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel...	e		o
Low		a

Consonants

	bilabial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals...	alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...	palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...	velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....
voiceless stop Stop -Film:* Stop, a 1970 film by Bill Gunn* Stop, a 1972 Quebec film by Jean Beaudin* Stop!, a 2004 film starring Dia Mirza-Music:* double stop, the act of playing two notes simultaneously* organ stop, a component of a pipe organ-Albums:... s	p	t		k
voiced stop Stop -Film:* Stop, a 1970 film by Bill Gunn* Stop, a 1972 Quebec film by Jean Beaudin* Stop!, a 2004 film starring Dia Mirza-Music:* double stop, the act of playing two notes simultaneously* organ stop, a component of a pipe organ-Albums:... s	b	d		g
voiceless Spirant		s
Rhotic Rhotic In linguistics, rhotic can refer to:* Rhotic consonant, such as the sound in red* R-colored vowel, such as the sound in Midwestern American English pronunciation of fur and before a consonant as in hard....		r
Semi-vowel	w		j	h

Consonantal contrasts

The following words show some of the consonant contrasts.

Bilabial contrasts

/pakó/ 'mom'

/bapá/ 'plate'

/wapá/ 'payment'

Alveolar contrasts

/botéa/ 'a fish'

/bodé/ 'dragonfly'

/bosé/ 'party'

/boré/ 'whitening'

Velar and palatal contrasts

/bɨkó/ 'ant-eater'

/bɨgó/ 'aunt'

/hoó/ 'plantain'

/yoó/ 'thread'

Consonantal variation

• The voiceless stops /p, t, k/ have aspirated variants that tend to occur before high vowels and not near voiceless vowels. There are a few degrees of the amount of aspiration.
• Preglottalized variants of /b, d/ occur together at the onset.
  • Preglottal forms of [m, w, ~w, y, ~y, ɲ, dʒ] occur in the onset and are in free variations with their plain counterparts.
• Prenasal variants of /b, d, g/ occur after nasal vowels and before oral vowels: /kĩĩbai/ [kʰĩĩmbaiʰ].

Nasal Assimilation

• Voiced consonants /b, d, g, r, w, y/ have nasal variants at the same place of articulation [m, n, ɳ, ŋ, ~w, ~y] before nasal vowels.
  • The /y/ can also surface as ɲ before high nasal vowels.
• The [h] also has a nasalized variant that occurs before nasal vowels.

Nasal Harmony

Segments in a word are either all nasal or all oral.

/waa/ 'to go'

/ɯ̃ãã/ 'to illuminate' (the /w/ is nasal)

Note that voiceless segments are transparent.

/ãkã/ 'choke on a bone'

/ɯ̃ãtĩ/ 'demon'

See further remarks regarding the oral/nasal nature of affixes in the Morphophonemics section.

Suprasegmental features

The two suprasegmental features in this language are tone

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...

 and nasalization

Nasalization

In phonetics, nasalization is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth...

.

Tone

There is a H-tone and a L-tone in Tuyuca. The phonological word has one and only one high tone which may occur in any syllable of the word. The low tone has two variants: a mid-tone that occurs in words that have at least three syllables in free variation with the low tone in internal syllables that have an [i] vowel contiguous to the H-tone and not preceded by a low-tone.

• Accent is the same as high tone.
• Tone is contrastive in (C)VV syllables

/díi/ 'blood'

/dií/ 'mud'

• Words of type (C)VCV have tone on the second syllable (but not in loanwords)

/eté/ 'parakeet'

/b~ésa/ 'table' (< Portuguese 'mesa')

Nasalization

Nasalization is phonemic and operates on the root level:

/sĩã/ 'to kill'

/sia/ 'to tie'

Phonetic distribution and syllabic structure

A syllable is considered any unit that may take tone and is comprised of a vocalic nucleus with or without a consonant before it.

Restrictions

• /g/ and /r/ never occur word-initially
• The strings /gu/ and /wu/ are absent.
• A VV string can be made up of any two vowels, either of which may occur first, except for /u/ which always occurs last.
• Multi-syllabic VVV strings occur, but not all combinations of vowels are attested. /u/ is always last in such strings.
• (C)V may be optionally realized with aspiration (having the same quality as the preceding vowel) when the syllable is unstressed and precedes syllables with voiceless onsets ..

Morphophonemics

All affixes fall into one of two classes:

1. Oral affixes which may undergo nasalization, like the plural morpheme -ri: /sopéri/ [sòO'pe~rĩh] 'marks'
2. Affixes that are intrinsically oral or nasal and cannot be changed.

When a nasal CV suffix occurs where C is a continuant or a vibrant /r/, the nasalization spreads regressively to the preceding vowel.

Difficulty

The Economist

The Economist

The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...

has described Tuyuca as the world's "most difficult" language because of its many noun classes and its evidentiality

Evidentiality

In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and/or what kind of evidence exists. An evidential is the particular grammatical element that indicates evidentiality...

: something which requires that all sentences be supported by evidence which the speaker must give in the form of verbal suffixes.

External links

• Tuyuca language dictionary online from IDS (select simple or advanced browsing)
• Ethnologue entry