Ye'kuana language

In Brazil, the Ye’kuana are believed to have settled on the lands they now occupy more than a century ago, coming from the larger population centres in Venezuela. Traditional mythology and oral history, however, tells that the lands around the Auari and Uraricoera rivers have long been travelled by the Ye’kuana.[4]

During the 18th century, there was a lot of missionary activity in Ye'kuana territory, during which they were forced into constructing forts for the Spanish, and coerced into converting to Catholicism.[5] A rebellion was organised against the Spanish in 1776. The 20th century brought a new wave of exploitation in the form of the colonists looking to capitalise on the discovery of rubber. Whole villages were forced into labour, driven in chain gangs to the rubber camps. Later, another wave of missionaries arrived around the early 1960s. The Brazilian Ye'kuana decided not to live in the missions established on that side of the border, because the missionaries’ attention in Brazil was focused on the Sanumá and not on them. They were also more reluctant to convert, having seen their Venezuelan cousins convert and become (from the Brazilian Ye'kuana perspective) culturally weaker as a result, giving up key elements of their traditional ways of life. On the Venezuelan side of the border, this wave of missionaries brought the establishment of health services, schools, and access to local markets, also creating several relatively large communities centred around the missions.[5]

In 1980, a married Canadian missionary couple came to live among the Ye’kuana for a while, but they did not like their way of life, and there were disagreements between them and the Ye’kuana, and they left. After this, the Brazilian Ye’kuana decided that they did not want religion, but they did want a school, seeing the benefits that that infrastructure had provided indigenous communities in Venezuela. They got one, after negotiating with the leader of the Evangelical Mission of Amazônas. So began a process of becoming sedentary, wherein the Ye’kuana all moved closer together, and established semi-regular schedules (including that certain times of day for children were set aside for school). This establishment of solid permanent contact also led to more far-reaching mobilisation and contact with other indigenous communities and the state of Roraima. The Ye’kuana became known as skilled canoe makers and manioc scrapers, all while remaining fairly removed from the intense river traffic and influx of outsiders that had harmed many other indigenous communities.[5]

The Ye’kuana language is situated typologically in the Cariban family, which is subdivided into seven subfamilies and one uncategorised language. Ye’kuana is a member of the Guianan Carib subfamily, along with ten other languages. The Guianan languages are located, for the most part, around the Guiana Shield. Ye’kuana and Wayumara form a smaller category within the Guianan subfamily, the Maquiritari-Wayumara subfamily.

The first documentations of Ye’kuana in the nineteenth century consist of several wordlists by Schomburgk,[6][7][8] followed by several comparative[9] and ethnographic[10] works. The early twentieth century saw more wordlists,[11][12] moving away from works more generally about the Cariban languages[13][14] to more specifically focusing on Ye’kuana.[15] Escoriaza (1959[16] and 1960)[17] provided a grammatical sketch. The 1960s and 70s mostly saw work on the ethnography of the Ye’kuana, including their mythology,[18] political structure,[19] and village formation.[20] Schuster 1976[21] published a wordlist within his ethnography, but otherwise there was not much linguistic study in that time period. Heinen (1983–1984)[22] published a grammar sketch couched in his mostly ethnographic study; Guss (1986)[23] includes some texts in the language in his publication on oral tradition; and Hall (1988)[24] published two volumes on morphosyntax and discourse analysis. Later, Hall (1991)[25] looked at transitivity in verbs, amid many more ethnographic studies, and Chavier (1999)[26] studied some further aspects of the morphology. A dictionary was published on CD-ROM,[27] and most recently, Natália Cáceres’ MA thesis is a brief overview of the sociolinguistic profile of the Ye'kuana,[28] while her doctoral dissertation presents a more complete descriptive grammar.[2] Coutinho (2013) has also explored the number system of Ye'kuana, from a typological perspective.[29]

At the beginning of a word, and after a glottal stop, /ɾ̠/ becomes [d], /j/ is in free variation with [ɟ], and /h/ becomes [hʷ] ~ [ɸ]; this last change also happens following /o/, /u/, or /w/.

All consonants except the glottal stop /ʔ/ can be found geminated; it is unclear what phonetic environments allow gemination, and similarly unclear whether a distinction exists between geminated consonants and sequences of glottal stop plus consonant. The phoneme /k/ is commonly labialized to [kʷ] when geminated or preceded by /ʔ/, /o/, /u/, or /w/, and occasionally also after /n/ [ŋ].

The glottal stop /ʔ/ is always treated as part of the syllable coda for the purposes of assigning stress (see below) and can also be realized as laryngealization (creaky voice) on the preceding vowel.

Nasals become [ŋ] before /k/, /w/, and /ʔ/, [ɲ] after /i/ and /j/, and [m] before /h/; in this last case the /h/ also assimilates to become an unvoiced [m̥]. Any nasal can cause nasalization of a preceding short vowel.

Most consonants palatalize in various ways after /i/ and /j/: /t/ and /k/ become [tʃ], /s/ becomes [ʃ], /h/ becomes [ç], nasals become [ɲ], /w/ and /ɾ̠/ ordinarily become [j], and /ɾ̠/ becomes [tʃ] in certain special cases (at the right border of a word, or sometimes as part of the possessive suffix -dü).

Syllables have a (C)V(ː/C) structure. Long vowels cannot occur in closed syllables. Syllables codas can only be /w/, /j/, /ʔ/, or a nasal, and the final syllable of a word can only have coda /w/ or /j/ (or no coda at all).

There are two separate accentual systems operating simultaneously. One deals with vowel length and is iambic in nature: it causes the vowel in every short-vowelled open syllable preceded by a short-vowelled open syllable to lengthen, applied recursively from the start of the word. Thus, some long vowels are unpredictable and phonemic, while others can be fully predicted by the vowel lengthening rule; writing systems differ in choosing to represent either only the first type or both types as long. This rule does not apply to bisyllabic words, whose vowel lengths seem irregular, and it also does not affect the final syllables of longer words, which show no length distinction. The second accentual system deals with pitch and is simpler: in words without attached clitics, a high pitch tends to fall on the penultimate syllable.

Some dialectal variation is found. In some areas speakers (particularly younger city-dwellers) merge /ʃ/ into /s/. A Ye'kwana and De'kwana dialect are sometimes differentiated, where some words that have /j/ in Ye'kwana have /ɾ̠/ instead in De'kwana. Sequences of /wɾ̠/ [wɾ̠] ~ [wɾ̠ʷ] ~ [ɾ̠ʷ] in De'kwana also correspond to /ɾ̠ɾ̠/ [dd] in Ye'kwana, and some vowels differ.[2]

Several different orthographies are in use. In Venezuela, the one in widest official use was devised in the 1970s according to the conventions of the Venezuelan Indigenous Languages Alphabet (ALIV) (with some later modifications).[2] It has been widely adopted by speakers in the state of Bolívar. Earlier orthographies designed by missionaries still see some usage, however, and speakers in Brazil and in the Venezuelan state of Amazonas in particular often use a somewhat different system.[29][30]

Ye’kuana's morphology is comparable to that of other Cariban languages.[2]^: 107 Ye'kuana makes use of the following major grammatical aspects: past and non-past. The 'past' aspect is subdivided into recent and distant (the much more used of the two) as well as perfective and imperfective.[2]^{: 213–221} The 'non-past' is used for present, near future, and general truths.[2]^{: 222–225} As well, probable and definite future aspects are morphologically distinct, there is a distinct imperfective suffix, and the iterative, durative (past), inchoative, terminative aspects are all marked, the latter three being marked periphrastically, rather than with a suffix like the others.[2]^{: 226–253}

• ELAR archive of Documentation of Ye'kwana