Arawan languages

Arawan (also Arahuan, Arauan, Arawán, Arawa, Arauán) is a family of languages spoken in western Brazil (Amazonas, Acre) and Peru.

Family division

Arauan consists of 8 or 9 languages:

• Arawá (also known as Arawa, Arua) (†)
• Kulina (also known as Culina-Madijá, Culina)
• Deni
• Jamamadi (also known as Madi)
• Paumari
• Suruwahá (also known as Sorowahá, Zuruahá)

The entire ethnic group that spoke Arawá became extinct in 1877 due to measles.

Kanamanti is listed in Kaufman (1994) with a question mark. Gordon (2005) does not list a Kanamantí language but does list the terms Kanamanti and Canamanti as alternate names for Jamamadi. Buller et al. (1993) does not list Kanamanti in their list of Arawan languages.

Zuruahá is listed in Gordon (2005) and mentioned in Kaufman (1994) from personal communication from Dan Everett — first contact with the community (a 3-day hike from the Dení's territory in Amazonas) was made in 1980. The language had not been studied as of 1994, but seems most similar to Deni.

External links

• Ethnologue: Arauan
• Proel: Sub-tronco Arawán

Bibliography

• Buller, Barbara; Buller, Ernest; & Everett, Daniel L. (1993). Stress placement, syllable structure, and minimality in Banawá. International Journal of American Linguistics, 59 (1), 280-293.
• Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
• Dixon, R. M. W. (2001). Internal reconstruction of tense-modal suffixes in Jarawara. Diachronica, 18, 3-30.
• Dixon, R. M. W. (2004a). The Jarawara language of southern Amazonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-927067-8.
• Dixon, R. M. W. (2004b). Proto-Arawá phonology. Anthropological Linguistics, 46, 1–83.
• Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (Ed.). (2005). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (15th ed.). Dallas, TX: SIL International. ISBN 1-55671-159-X. (Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com).
• Kaufman, Terrence. (1990). Language history in South America: What we know and how to know more. In D. L. Payne (Ed.), Amazonian linguistics: Studies in lowland South American languages (pp. 13–67). Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-70414-3.
• Kaufman, Terrence. (1994). The native languages of South America. In C. Mosley & R. E. Asher (Eds.), Atlas of the world's languages (pp. 46–76). London: Routledge.