Aguaruna language

Aguaruna (or as native speakers prefer to call it, Awajún [ɑwɑhʊ́n̪]) is an indigenous American language of the Chicham family spoken by the Aguaruna people in Northern Peru. According to Ethnologue, based on the 2007 Census, 53,400 people out of the 55,700 ethnic group speak Aguaruna, making up almost the entire population. It is used vigorously in all domains of life, both written and oral. It is written with the Latin script. The literacy rate in Aguaruna is 60–90%. However, there are few monolingual speakers today; nearly all speakers also speak Spanish. The school system begins with Aguaruna, and as the students progress, Spanish is gradually added. There is a positive outlook and connotation in regard to bilingualism. 50 to 75% of the Aguaruna population are literate in Spanish. A modest dictionary of the language has been published.

The speakers live in the Eastern foothills of the Andes, along the upper Marañón River and its tributaries. More specifically, its location includes the Amazonas, Cajamarca, Loreto, and San Martín regions, as well as the Cahuapanas, Mayo, and Potro rivers. There are two major varieties of Aguaruna: one spoken around the Nieva River, considered the more conservative variety, and the other spoken around the Marañón River. Within the Chicham family, there are four languages: Aguaruna, Huambisa, Shuar, and Achuar-Shiwiar. Speakers of Aguaruna claim mutual intelligibility with speakers of Huambisa, so there is speculation that the Chicham family may better be described as a dialect continuum. This language family shares many similarities to both the Amazonian and Andean languages, likely due to their close proximity and contact with one another. The language contains twelve consonants and four vowels that each have both oral and nasal forms. It has subject–object–verb word order, meaning the sentence structure is verb-final.

The consonant system of Aguaruna includes all of the consonants included in the chart below. However, formally Aguaruna only contains twelve distinct consonant phonemes. They include the following: four stops, two affricates, three fricatives, two nasals, and a flap. Aguaruna shows a strong preference for unvoiced consonants, as only the nasal and flap phonemes are voiced. The labial stop [b] and the dental stop [d] exist only as oral allophones of the nasal obstruents /m/ and /n/, respectively, in defined phonological conditions, though these conditions may sometimes be lexical. There are three approximants included in the chart: [j], [w~ʋ], [ɰ]. They function as consonants within phonological processes, though they exist only as allophones of the vowels /i/, /u/, and /ɨ/, respectively. /j/ is written ⟨ñ⟩ when nasalized due to the following of a nasal vowel. The existence of [ŋ] as an allophone for [ɰ] is disputed. Note that [ʔ] does not appear with an orthographic equivalent in the chart below. This is because there is no consensus between speakers; it may be written with ⟨k⟩, ⟨t⟩, or ⟨h⟩. The glottal stop appears only in three lexemes, all intervocalically, and in a few interjections, so is quite rare and therefore not often written.

Aguaruna has four vowels that each have an oral and nasal form, illustrated in the table below. The three high vowels often have the lowered allophones [ɪ], [ə], and [ʊ], from front to back. The only rounded vowel is [u]. Nasality is contrastive in pairs such as [ũha] 'open' versus [uha] 'tell', and [sũw̃ɨ̃] 'neck' versus [súwɨ] 'dark'. Nasal and oral vowels are often not distinguished in writing.^{[citation needed]}

The syllabic structure of Aguaruna is quite complex because the language contains many clusters of consonants and vowels. A nucleus may consist of short vowels, long vowels, diphthongs, and triphthongs, and processes like synaeresis and other vowel elisions further complicate it. The underlying syllable structure is (C)V(N): a vowel as the nucleus, an optional consonant as the onset, and an optional nasal segment as the coda, which may either be a nasal or a nasalized vowel. There are several processes that occur when producing the phonetic syllable. First, high vowels become glides and form onsets. Then, one syllable in each word gets a pitch accent (see section below for more details). Next, vowels adjacent to one another merge to create one nucleus as either a long vowel, diphthong, or triphthong. Finally, processes of vowel elision occur. Syllables may either be light or heavy. Light syllables contain one vowel and are open (CV). Heavy syllables may contain a complex nucleus or a coda: CVV(V)(C) or CVC. Aguaruna has a minimum word requirement of two phonological syllables.

There are several conditions for forming glides from high vowels. The general rules are as follows:

Word-initial /i, u/ are realized as [j, w] when in front of a non-identical vowel. For example, /i.u.mi/ 'water' becomes /ju.mi/. Note that [ɰ] cannot appear in the word-initial position.

Aguaruna also experiences three types of vowel elision: apocope, syncope, and diphthong reduction. Apocope takes precedence; the nucleus of the final light syllable (CV) is deleted. For example, /nahana-ta/ 'to create' becomes [nahánat], as the final vowel is deleted. If there is a syllable-final nasal, then this creates a heavy syllable and apocope is blocked. When CV roots appear without a suffix, their vowels are lengthened, creating an underlying structure of two syllables, even if the surface form is monosyllabic.