Tariana (also Tariano) is an endangered Maipurean (also known as Arawak) language spoken along the Vaupés River in Amazonas, Brazil by approximately 100 people.
Another approximately 1,500 people in the upper and middle Vaupés River area identify themselves as ethnic Tariana but do not speak the language fluently.
In this region, languages—like tribal identity—are passed down through patrilineal descent, and as such are kept strictly separate from one another, with minimal lexical borrowing occurring among them.
The Indigenous people of this region traditionally spoke between three and ten other languages, including their mother's and father's tongues—which were usually different due to the widespread cultural practice of linguistic exogamy—and Spanish and/or Portuguese.
Speakers of Tariana have been switching to the unrelated Tucano language (of the Tucanoan family), which became a lingua franca in the Vaupés region in the late 19th century.
Arriving in the region in the 1920s, Salesian missionaries promoted the exclusive use of Tucano among Indians in an effort to convert them.
Economic concerns have also led fathers to increasingly leave their families to work for non-Amerindian Brazilians, which has undermined the patrilineal father-child interaction through which Tariana was traditionally acquired.
[3]: 6–9 Research on Tariana, including a grammar book and a Tariana-Portuguese dictionary, has been done by Alexandra Aikhenvald from the La Trobe University, a specialist on the Arawak language family.
[4] Tariana has a relatively large phoneme inventory, compared to other Vaupés languages such as Baniwa and Tucano.
It has a rare set of phonotactic restrictions that determine whether phonemes can occur initially or medially and in which types of morphemes.
Tariana has 24 consonants: A tendency to insert a glottal stop /ʔ/ after word-final /a/ has been noted among younger speakers.
Tariana is a pitch-accent language, with stressed syllables indicated by a higher pitch and a greater intensity in pronunciation.
[3]:122 The Indefinite Prefix This is a nominal morphological aspect shared with Baniwa of Içana and Baré, two of Tariana’s Arawak sisters.
[3]: 287–289 In interrogative clauses, the same three non-future tenses fuse with evidentials to designate visual, non-visual, and inferred information.
Use of an inferred evidential, for example, implies that the speaker assumes the addressee not to have direct access to evidence on the subject at hand.
[3]: 311–317 Note the remote past non-visual is rarely used except as a "conventionalized conversation sustainer," an interrogative repetition of a storyteller's predicates to indicate listeners' attention.
[3]: 320–321 Word order in Tariana is "pragmatically based" and is generally free except for a handful of specific contexts:[3]: 561 du-kare3SG.F-heartdu-wara-ka3SG.NF-diminish-REC.P.VISdu-kare du-wara-ka3SG.F-heart 3SG.NF-diminish-REC.P.VIS"She is worried (lit.
In general, modifiers precede a definite or topical noun and follow an "indefinite, non-specific, or otherwise inconsequential nominal referent.
"[3]: 476 nethenma:tʃitebad+NCL:ANIMhema-yanatapir-PEJdi-swa-nhi-na3SG.NF-lie-ANT-REM.P.VISne ma:tʃite hema-yana di-swa-nhi-nathen bad+NCL:ANIM tapir-PEJ 3SG.NF-lie-ANT-REM.P.VIS"Then a naughty (well-known) bad tapir was lying (there).