Cabécar language

Cabécar
Native to Costa Rica
Region Turrialba Region (Cartago Province)
Ethnicity 9,300 (2000)[1]
Native speakers
8,800  (2000)[1]
80% monolingual (no date)[2]
Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3 cjp
Glottolog cabe1245[3]

The Cabécar language is an indigenous American language of the Chibchan language family which is spoken in Costa Rica. Specifically, it is spoken in the inland Turrialba Region of the Cartago Province. 80% of speakers are monolingual; as of 2007, it is the only indigenous language in Costa Rica with monolingual adults.[1] The language is also known by its dialect names Chirripó and Estrella.[1]

Orthography

Cabécar uses a Latin alphabet with umlauts for (ë, ö), and tildes for (ã, ẽ, ĩ, õ, ũ).[4]

Phonology

Cabécar has twelve vowels, five of which are nasalized.[4]

Typology

Cabécar has a canonical word order of subject–object–verb.[1]

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Cabécar at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Cabécar language at Ethnologue (13th ed., 1996). Note: Undated data may come from an earlier edition.
  3. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Cabecar". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  4. 4.0 4.1 Native-languages.org