Urarina language

Urarina is a language isolate spoken in Peru, specifically in the Loreto Region of Northwest Peru, by the Urarina people. There are around 3,000 speakers in Urarinas District (along the Chambira River). It uses the Latin script. It is also known as Itucali, Simacu or Shimacu.

It has the rare canonical word order of object–verb–subject.

The classification of Urarina remains contentious: academics have placed the language in at least four language families including Panoan, Tupian, Macro-Tucanoan, and Amerind. However, the proposed language families share few similarities with Urarina, meaning it is likely best described as either “unclassified” or as a language isolate. It is usually assumed that it is a language isolate given Urarina’s complete lack of lexical overlap with any languages surrounding Urarina territory.

There are four Urarina dialect zones:

Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Arawak, Leko, and Omurano language families due to contact.

Urarina is currently spoken by the 2,000–3,000 members of the Urarina tribe, the majority of whom have retained the ability to speak the language. However, bilingualism and use of Spanish in everyday life is on the rise, as more and more Spanish-speaking mestizos have immigrated to the valley where the Urarina live. While there is a bilingual education system, most bilingual schools almost exclusively use Spanish, as the majority of the teachers do not speak Urarina. The version of Urarina that is spoken by younger generations has lost a substantial degree of grammatical complexity and vocabulary, as correlated to the loss of traditional cultural practices and beliefs. The language is considered potentially endangered.

The following is the phonology of Urarina as described by Olawsky.

Orthography is only written where it differs from IPA