Yaminawa language


Yaminawa is a Panoan language of western Amazonia. It is spoken by the Yaminawá and some related peoples.
Yaminawa constitutes an extensive dialect cluster. Attested dialects are two or more Brazilian Yaminawa dialects, Peruvian Yaminawa, Chaninawa, Chitonawa, Mastanawa '', Parkenawa, Shanenawa, Sharanawa, Shawannawa, Yawanawá, Yaminawa-arara. Xinane Yura'', a recently discovered variety, is spoken by a group contacted in Kampa and Envira River Isolated Peoples Indigenous Territory, Acre, Brazil during the 2010s.
Very few Yaminawá speak Spanish or Portuguese, though the Shanenawa have mostly shifted to Portuguese. Other sources report that the Yamináwa have switched entirely to Portuguese and no longer use their original language.

Phonology

The vowels of Yaminawa are /a, i, ɯ, u/. /i, ɯ, u/ can also be heard as . Sharanawa, Yaminawa, and Yora have nasalized counterparts for each of the vowels, and demonstrate contrastive nasalization.
BilabialAlveolarRetroflexPalatalVelarGlottal
Plosive
Affricate
Fricative
Nasal
Approximant
Flap

is heard as an allophone of /ɾ/. /j/ can also be heard as a nasal.
Yawanawá has a similar phonemic inventory to Yaminawa, but uses a voiced bilabial fricative in place of the voiceless bilabial fricative. Yawanawá and Sharanahua have an additional phoneme, the voiced labio-velar approximant. Shanewana has a labiodental fricative instead of.
Yaminawa has contrastive tone, with two surface tones, high and low.

Grammar

Yaminawa is a polysynthetic, primarily suffixing language that also uses compounding, nasalization, and tone alternations in word-formation. Yaminawa exhibits split ergativity; nouns and third person pronouns pattern along ergative-absolutive lines, while first and second person pronouns pattern along nominative-accusative lines. Yaminawa verbal morphology is extensive, encoding affective meanings and categories like associated motion. Yaminawa also has a set of switch reference enclitics that encode same or different subject relationships as well as aspectual relationships between the dependent clause and the main clause.