Resígaro language
| Resígaro | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Peru |
| Region | Department of Loreto |
| Ethnicity | Resígaro |
Native speakers | 1 (2017)[1] |
Arawakan
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | rgr |
| Glottolog | resi1247 |
| ELP | Resígaro |
Resígaro is an Arawakan language spoken in the department of Loreto in Peru. It is believed to be nearly extinct as of 2017 with only one remaining speaker.[2][3]
Classification
[edit]Aikhenvald (1999) classifies it among the Western Nawiki Upper Amazonian languages.[4] Kaufman (1994) had made it a separate branch of Upper Amazonian.[5] The language has been erroneously classified as belonging to the Witotoan languages, though this is actually due to extensive language contact between Resigaro and Bora.[6][7]
History
[edit]In 1971 to 1972, there were only four adult and six child speakers of Resigaro left in Puerto Izango. Other people who identified as Resigaro could speak only Ocaina instead. One other woman who was married to a Bora could also speak Resigaro, but she rarely spoke the language at all.[8]
On November 25, 2016, the last female speaker of Resígaro, Rosa Andrade Ocagane, was brutally murdered in a beheading at the age of 67. Her niece reported “She was beheaded. Her head was not found, neither her heart.”[9][10][11]
The only other remaining speaker known is Andrade's brother, Pablo Andrade Ocagane, who still lives. He and his late sister had been preparing a project with the Ministry of Culture to document their language since October 2016, and to update books on grammar and an outdated dictionary made in the 1950s by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, that promoted the translation of the Bible.[9]
Language contact
[edit]Resígaro has many morphological borrowings from Bora, such as pronouns, number markings, and case markers. However, there are relatively few lexical loanwords.[7]
Phonology
[edit]| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | aspirated | pʰ | tʰ | kʰ | ||
| voiceless | p | t | tʲ | k | ʔ | |
| voiced | b | d | dʲ | g | ||
| Affricate | aspirated | t͡sʰ | c͡çʰ | |||
| voiceless | t͡s | c͡ç | ||||
| voiced | d͡z | ɟ͡ʝ | ||||
| Fricative | voiceless | f | s | ç | h | |
| voiced | v | ʝ | ||||
| Nasal | voiceless | m̥ | n̥ | ɲ̥ | ||
| voiced | m | n | ɲ | |||
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i | u | |
| Mid | e | o | |
| Low | a |
References
[edit]- ^ Resígaro at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
- ^ International, Survival. "Peru: Last female speaker of indigenous Amazonian language murdered". www.survivalinternational.org. Archived from the original on 2022-01-21. Retrieved 2020-08-04.
- ^ Fowks, Jacqueline (December 21, 2016). "Asesinada en Perú la última mujer hablante de resígaro". Archived from the original on March 22, 2022. Retrieved August 4, 2020 – via elpais.com.
- ^ Dixon, Robert M. W.; Aĭkhenvalʹd, A. I︠U︡, eds. (1999). The Amazonian languages (PDF). Cambridge language surveys. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-57021-3.
- ^ Moseley, Christopher; Asher, R. E.; Tait, Mary (1994), Atlas of the world's languages, London ; New York: Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-01925-5
- ^ Payne, David L. (April 1985). "The Genetic Classification of Resigaro". International Journal of American Linguistics. 51 (2): 222–231. doi:10.1086/465867. ISSN 0020-7071.
- ^ a b Seifart, Frank. 2011. Bora loans in Resígaro: Massive morphological and little lexical borrowing in a moribund Arawakan language Archived 2022-01-21 at the Wayback Machine. Cadernos de Etnolingüística Série Monografias, 2.
- ^ a b "Allin, Trevor R. 1976. A grammar of Res'igaro. Horsleys Green, England: Summer Institute of Linguistics. 47–48pp" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-12-06. Retrieved 2022-05-23.
- ^ a b "Beheaded in Peru: Rosa Andrade, Last Female Speaker of Resigaro Language - Indian Country Media Network". indiancountrymedianetwork.com. Archived from the original on 2018-01-09. Retrieved 2017-05-23.
- ^ Fowks, Jacqueline (2018-09-13). "Beheaded in Peru: Rosa Andrade, Last Female Speaker of Resigaro Language". ICT News. Retrieved 2025-01-01.
- ^ "There were only two speakers of this language left in the world, and one was murdered". Quartz. 2016-12-22. Retrieved 2026-05-31.
External links
[edit]- Resígaro DoReCo corpus compiled by Frank Seifart. Audio recordings of narrative texts, with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level and translations.