Arabela language: Difference between revisions

Arabela
Tapweyokwaka
Native to	Perú
Native speakers	50 (2002 SIL)
Language family	(specify language family under 'fam1' or 'family') Zaparoan Arabela
Official status
Official language in	Peru[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-2	arl
ISO 639-3	arl
ELP	Arabela
File:Zaparo.jpg

Arabela is an indigenous American language of the Zaparoan family spoken in two Peruvian villages in tropical forest along the Napo tributary of the Arabela river.

Also known as Chiripuno and Chiripunu, it is spoken by about 50 people out of an ethnic population of about 500^[2]. However, some of the speakers have a passive understanding of Arabela, but do not speak it. Due to the very low number of speakers, it is classified as a seriously endangered language.

Since there are so few speakers of Arabela left, its speakers speak either Spanish or Quechua as a second language. The literacy rate for Arabela as a first language is about 10-30%, and about 50-75% for a second language. It uses a SVO order (SVO)^[3] order, a very common word order, used in English, Albanian, Chinese, Spanish, and Xhosa.

Like all native languages in Peru it has an official statut in areas where it is spoken. ^[4]

Arabela is a language of the zaparoan family of languages. Zaparoan tongues were once widely spoken in the rain forest of north-eastern Peru. Zaparoan speaking people have been decimated by diseases, wars with neighboring native groups and by quasi-enslavement during the rubber boom. Most zaparoan communities have shifted to San-Martin Quechua or Spanish, others have been incorporated intu shuar groups and the few surviving zaparoan languages are all severely endangered. Among those arabela is most closely related to zaparo (the only one still spoken), Andoa and Conambo.

The dominant languages of the area are kichwa and Spanish and they are both widely spoken by arabelas. Kichwa has been the default language for native communities in the area since the rubber boom era and was spread through trade mixed marriages. It is, however, losing ground to Spanish in the younger generations. The use of arabela is restricted to a small elderly fraction of the population. The language is official as the Constitution of Peru but this did not stop its decline. There is no written literature in Arabela but the language has been used in education by the Peruvian government, which has issued some school material in it. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been translated into arabela in 1988

There is no dialectal division among known arabela speakers. A small group, called Pananuyuri, separated from other arabelas roughly a century ago. Their fate is unknown but they may have survived, in which case their dialect is likely to have somewhat diverged from the other speakers'

The arabela phonemic inventory is quite typical for a zaparoan language. Ii has five places of articulation and a vowel inventory standard for its family with five vowels

Arabela has no grammatical gender but for a few words, mostly describing persons, the sex can be specified by adding a suffix :

• Cua niya-nu : my son
• Cua niya-tu : my daughter

Arabela has two grammatical numbers, singular and plural. The plural is generally added by adding a suffix to the singular, the nature of this suffix varying according the pluralized word.

• tia : house yields tiaca : houses
• maaji : woman, yields maajipohua : women
• niyacoo : unmarried girl yields niyacoojori : unmarried girls.

In a few cases, however, the plural can be formed through suffix substitution, or by using a different root altogether.

• caya : man yields canuu
• maanu : group yields maapue
• nucua : mother yields nuhuocuaca

A numbers of other word form their plural by removing a singular specific suffix

• saijia stone yields sai stone

Arabela has a complex pronominal system, similar to the one of the other zaparoan languages and distinguishes between active and passive personnal pronouns. Active pronouns act as subjects in independent clause and as objects in dependent ones.

The verbal ending -no is used as an anaphoric. It can also mark the subject of a subordinate sentence when it refers to the object of the main sentence.

Arabela has three kinds of demonstrative pronouns :

• noo indicates an object close to the speaker
• nio indicates an object further away from the speaker (Nio-te quia panishano - is it what you want)
• cuno indicates a contrast between objects or persons (cuno-cuaja cua sare - this is my dog)

• Ethnologue: Languages of the World (unknown ed.). SIL International.^{[This citation is dated, and should be substituted with a specific edition of Ethnologue]}

• Dicconario Arabella—Castellano, Rolland G. Rich, Instituto Lingüistico de Verano, Perú – 1999
• Rich, Furne. 1963. "Arabela Phonemes and High-Level Phonology," SPIL I, 193-206

• Entry for Arabela at Rosetta Project
• Dicconario Arabella—Castellano, Rolland G. Rich, Instituto Lingüistico de Verano, Perú – 1999
• Ethnologue: Languages of the World (unknown ed.). SIL International.^{[This citation is dated, and should be substituted with a specific edition of Ethnologue]}