Ticuna language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ticuna is a language spoken by approximately 40,000 people in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. It is the native language of the Ticuna people. Ticuna is classified as a language isolate.

Ticuna is also known as Magta, Tikuna, Tucuna, Tukna, and Tukuna.

1 Sociolinguistic situation
2 Literacy
3 Linguistic structure
4 External links

[edit] Sociolinguistic situation

[edit] Brazil

Despite being home to more than 50% of the Tikunas, Brazil has only recently started to invest on native language education. Brazilian Tikunas now have a written literature and an education provided by the Brazilian National Foundation for the Indian (FUNAI) and the Ministry of Education. Textbooks in Tikuna are used by native teachers trained in both Portuguese and Ticuna to teach the language to the children. A large scale project has been recording traditional narrations and writing them down to provide the literate ticunas with some literature to practice with.

Tikuna education is not a privilege, but part of a wider project carried on by the Brazilian government to provide all significant minorities with education in their own language.

[edit] Peru

Tikunas in Peru have had native language education at least since the sixties. They use a writing system that was, apparently, the base for the development of the Brazilian one. However, much of the literature available to Peruvian Tikunas comprise standard textbooks.

[edit] Colombia

Colombian Tikunas are taught in Spanish, when they have access to school at all. Since the establishment of Tikuna schools in Brazil some have ventured to attend them ^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] Literacy

Besides its use at the tikuna schools, the language has a dozen books published every year, both in Brazil and Peru. Those books employ a specially devised phonetic writing system using conventions similar to those found in Brazilian Portuguese (except for K instead of C and the letter Ñ instead of NH) instead of the more complex scientific notation found, for instance, at the Language Museum.

[edit] Linguistic structure

Ticuna is a fairly isolating language morphologically, meaning that most words consist of just one morpheme. However, ticuna words usually have more than one syllable, unlike other isolating languages (like Chinese (language) and Vietnamese (language)).

It is a tonal language, with five tones corresponding to five levels of voice pitch separated by intervals of one semi tone (C, C#, D, D#, and E; for instance). For this feature ticuna may well be the hardest language to learn, at least for someone who can't sing. The tones are not, however, always identical, as different people have different singing voices. What is essential is the relative interval between the tones in a given phrase.Tones are indicated in writing by diacritic, when indicated at all.

Syntax is based on a simple Subject Verb Object (SVO) sentence structure.