Tïcuna, or Tïkuna, is a language spoken by approximately 40,000 people in Brazil

Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

, Peru

Peru

Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....

, and Colombia

Colombia

Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...

. It is the native language of the Tïcuna people. Tïcuna is generally classified as a language isolate

Language isolate

A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single...

, but may be related to the extinct Yuri language

Yuri language (Amazon)

Yurí is, or was, a language previously spoken near a stretch of the Caquetá River in the Brazilian Amazon, extending slightly into Colombia. A small amount of data was collected on two occasions in the 19th century, in 1853 and 1867...

. (See Tïcuna-Yuri.) It is a tonal language, and therefore the meaning of words with the same phonemes can vary greatly simply by changing the tone used to pronounce them.

Tïcuna is also known as Magta, Maguta, Tucuna/Tukuna, and Tukna.

Brazil

Despite being home to more than 50% of the Ticunas, Brazil has only recently started to invest on native language education. Brazilian Ticunas now have a written literature and an education provided by the Brazilian National Foundation for the Indian

Fundação Nacional do Índio

Fundação Nacional do Índio or FUNAI is a Brazilian governmental protection agency for Indian interests and their culture.It was originally called the SPI and was founded by the Brazilian Marshal Cândido Rondon in 1910, who also created the agency's motto, "Die if necessary, but never kill." The...

 (FUNAI) and the Ministry of Education. Textbooks in Ticuna 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.

Ticuna 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.

Peru

Ticunas in Peru have had native language education at least since the 1960s

1960s

The 1960s was the decade that started on January 1, 1960, and ended on December 31, 1969. It was the seventh decade of the 20th century.The 1960s term also refers to an era more often called The Sixties, denoting the complex of inter-related cultural and political trends across the globe...

. 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 Ticunas comprise standard textbooks.

Colombia

Colombian Ticunas are taught in Spanish, when they have access to school at all. Since the establishment of Ticuna schools in Brazil some have ventured to attend them .

Literacy

Besides its use at the Ticuna 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 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.

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, such as Vietnamese

Vietnamese language

Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...

.

Ticuna is a tonal language, with five tones corresponding to five levels of voice pitch, one of the few languages in the world to have so many level distinctions (Cantonese, for example, only has 3 levels, although it also has rising and falling tones, while Ticuna does not). Because a speaker's base pitch varies substantially with the individual it is the relative interval between the tones in a given phrase that truly distinguishes them, rather than their absolute pitch (as would be the case in music). Tones are indicated orthographically with diacritics, when indicated at all.

Typologically, Ticuna word order is subject–verb–object (SVO).

External links

• Entry for Ticuna at Rosetta Project
• "Conversational Tikuna" – Ticuna course and grammar at the Summer Institute of Linguistics
• Language Museum – Ticuna
• The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, translated into Ticuna