Karajá language

Karajá, also known as Iny rybè, is a Macro-Jê language spoken by the Karajá people in some thirty villages in central Brazil.
There are distinct male and female forms of speech; one of the principal differences is that men drop the sound, which is pronounced by women.
Karaja is a verb-final language, with simple noun and more complex verbal morphology that includes noun incorporation. Verbs inflect for direction as well as person, mood, object, and voice.

Dialects

Dialects are Northern Karajá, Southern Karajá, Xambioá, and Javaé.
Karajá proper is spoken on the main course of the Araguaia River in and around Bananal Island. Phonologically, it is set apart from the other dialects by the occurrence of the vowel /ə/, which corresponds to a full vowel in Javaé and Xambioá whose quality is a copy of the vowel of the next syllable. For example, Karajá bdi // ‘honey’, -dkỹ // ‘causative suffix’, -tka // ‘to tie’, kbò // ‘banzeiro’, kdò // ‘termite’, rkù // ‘gourd’ correspond to Javaé and Xambioá bidi //, -nỹkỹ //, -taka //, kòbò //, kòdò //, rùkù //. Another phonological feature unique to Karajá proper is the progressive palatalization of and following an : compare Karajá ritxòrè ‘offspring’, itxòrò ‘fox’, ritxoko ‘Ritxoko clay doll’, idjasò ‘arowana’ and Javaé/Xambioá rikòrè, ikòrò, rikoko, iraso. Examples of lexical differences between Karajá proper and other dialects include lei ‘anaconda’, tõsõ ‘woodpecker’, makiti ‘sugarcane’, corresponding to Javaé and Xambioá rei, sõsõ, biditi.
Karajá proper is further subdivided into Northern and Southern Karajá. Southern Karajá is spoken in the Fontoura village and further to the south, whereas Northern Karajá is spoken in the São Domingos village and further to the north. There are few differences between Northern and Southern Karajá. Examples of lexical differences include N jiarỹ / S diarỹ ‘I’, N wi / S wiu ‘song.♂’, N adèrana / S wdèna ‘prostitute’, N bdòlèkè / S bdòkùjkè ‘pirarucu fish’, N butxi / S boti ‘clay pot’, N õritxi / S uritxi ‘curassow’, and other word pairs. Northern Karajá also differs from Southern Karajá in using different habitual markers for different persons, whereas Southern Karajá uses -mỹhỹ for all three persons. In addition, there is a difference regarding the occurrence of the centripetal prefix in the first person of the realis mood. In Northern Karajá, it occurs only once, after the first person prefix: ãdiwyde ‘I brought it’. In Southern Karajá, it occurs twice, both before and after the person prefix: na'd'iwyde ‘I brought it’.
Javaé is currently spoken by the Javaés River, a smaller branch of the Araguaia, though historically the Javaé inhabited the interior of the Bananal island, until at least the first half of the 20th century. The Javaé are referred to by the Karajá proper as ixỹju, a term otherwise used to non-Karajá indigenous peoples such as the Xavante, but clearly speak a variety of Karajá. Javaé has more Apyãwa loans than other Karajá dialects. Phonologically, Javaé is characterized by the occurrence of /e/ corresponding to Karajá and Xambioá preceding a syllable which contains a : Javaé -tebiè ‘to raise, to feed’, hetxi ‘bottom, buttocks’, exi ‘soft’, -teji ‘to put’ correspond to Karajá -tbiè, htxi, àxi, tdi; Xambioá -txibiè, hitxi, ixi, tidi. In addition, Javaé has less genderlectal differences than Karajá and Xambioá, as in many cases the Javaé women systematically use forms that are restricted to the male genderlect in other dialects.
Xambioá is spoken on the east bank of the Araguaia, close to the mouth of the Maria River, which makes it the northernmost variety of Karajá. Ribeiro reports that there were only 8 fluent speakers in 1998, all of them elderly. Phonologically, Xambioá is characterized by the progressive palatalization of to following an, as in ikòrò ‘fox’. Another phonological feature of Xambioá is the occurrence of the oral allophone of where other dialects have : Xambioá habu ‘man’, ati ‘Pimelodus|mandi fish’, awò ‘canoe’ vs. Karajá hãbu, hãti, hãwò. Some Xambioá words are not found in other dialects, such as the Língua Geral Amazônica borrowing mabèra ‘paper’.

Phonology

Karajá has ten oral vowels,, and three nasal vowels,. The Javaé and Xambioá dialects differ from Karajá in lacking. is nasalized word initially and when preceded by or a voiced stop : → 'grass', → 'armadillo'. also triggers the occurrence of the nasal allophones of preceding or : → 'group', → 'my mother'.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i, ĩ		u
Near-close	ɪ		ʊ
Close-mid	e	ə, ə̃	o, õ
Open-mid	ɛ		ɔ
Open		a

This language has ATR vowel harmony which causes the non-ATR vowels to become more tense by the influence of a ATR vowel located further to the right. The vowels are opaque and is transparent to harmony. Note that undergo the harmony in an iterative manner, whether may optionally block the further spread of the feature: or ‘I drove it away’.
V → / _ -V
The chart below contains the consonant sounds used in Karajá.
The consonants are palatalized to when adjacent to high vowels. Consonants have nasal allophones when occurring before. In addition, in the Karajá proper dialect only, are progressively palatalized to following a. In fact, almost all occurrences of can be explained by the operation of these two processes; for these reasons, Ribeiro argues that have no phonemic status. Under this analysis, Karajá has only twelve consonant phonemes, eight of which are coronal. The chart below illustrates the phonemic inventory of Karajá assuming are not phonemic.

Men's and women's speech

Some examples of the differences between men's and women's speech, especially the presence or lack of , follow. Note that men maintain in at least one grammatical ending.

Women	Men	Gloss
kotù	òtù	turtle
kòlùkò	òlùò	labret
karitxakre /kaɾitʃa-kɾe/	ariakre /aɾia-kɾe/	I will walk*
bèraku	bero	river
anona	aõna	thinɡ
kabè	abè	coffee

* The derives historically from, and so becomes /ia/ in men's speech.
The first and third person pronouns differ based on gender of the speaker, but the second person pronoun kai is an exception to this rule, and is pronounced the same by men and women.
It is hypothesized that in the past this process of the k-drop became a sign of masculinity and women resisted it in order to keep a more conservative form of speech.

Morphology

Verb

The verb in Karajá grammar always agrees with the subject of the sentence, as it does in French for example; these agreements are determined by the past and present tense or future, potential, and admonitory tenses. Verbs have no lexical opposites and direction is represented through inflection; all Karajá verbs can inflect for direction. Verbs are either transitive or intransitive and the valence of each verb, therefore, may increase or decrease depending on their status as transitive or intransitive.

Noun

Nouns can be incorporated into verbs to create noun-verb compounds with the noun being placed into the verb. Any noun can be turned into a verb with the use of a suffix and action nouns can be created with the use of the verb stem.

Pronoun

There are three personal pronouns:

First person : ♀ jikarỹ, ♂ jiarỹ
Second person : kai
Third person : tki
These pronouns can be pluralized with the use of the pluralizer boho. When pluralized, the first person plural has both an inclusive and exclusive interpretation as in the following examples:

Possessive pronouns are not used but are instead marked by affixes and there are three demonstrative pronouns:

ka - ‘this’
kia - ‘that ’
kùa - ‘that ’
Direction

Direction in the Karajá language does not have any lexical opposites, such as in and out or go and come. Direction, rather, is marked by a set of prefixes that determine whether the event in the sentence is happening away from or toward the speaker. Centrifugal direction is characterized by means of the prefix r- while centripetal direction is characterized by means of the prefix d-. All the verbs in the Karajá language — even those that do not convey the semantics of movement — obligatorily inflect for direction.

Centrifugal:
Centripetal:
Syntax

Valence

Karajá language is characterized both by the reduction of valence and by the increase in valence. Valence increase happens through causitivization and through oblique promotion while valence decrease happens through reflixivatization, passivization, and antipassivization.

Valence increase

Unergative verbs may be causativized by means of suffixing the causativizer suffix -dkỹ plus the verbalizer suffix -ny to the nominalized verb. In the example below, the verb rika ‘to walk’ is first nominalized by means of the process of consonantal replacement, yielding rira, and then causativized.
The man in this example is the causer who makes the child, the causee, walk.

Valence-decreasing morphology

In Karajá, it is possible to demote a patient of a transitive verb to peripheral status by means of the antipassive prefix ò-:
Reflexivity in the Karajá language is marked by the reflexive prefix with two allomorphs, exi- ̣ and ixi- :
In these examples, the patient is coreferential with the agent.

Passivization

Passives are described as the change of a clause from a transitive to an intransitive sentence through the demotion of the subject. Passive verbs are marked either by the prefix a- :
Here, the subject ‘mother’ is demoted in the second example.