Tiriyó (; ) is the Cariban language used in everyday life by the Tiriyó people, the majority of whom are monolingual. Although Tiriyó is the preferred spelling, the Tiriyó refer to themselves as ; other variations, including , , and , exist. The Tiriyó are located on both sides of the Brazil-Suriname border in Lowland South America. Because Tiriyó is spoken by the entire Tiriyó population, its level of endangerment is low. However, it may be threatened by the presence of a newly installed radar station staffed by a considerable number of non-Indigenous people close to the main village.
Ewarhuyana, listed as an unclassified language in sources, is an alternate name for Tiriyó.Denise Fajardo Grupioni (2005). Tiriyó - Indigenous Peoples in Brazil. Instituto Socioambiental (ISA). A supposed "Salumá" language turned out to be either Tiriyó or Waiwai.
History The modern Tiriyó is formed from various different Indigenous communities; some of these, such as the Aramixó, are mentioned in European writings as early as 1609–1610. Many of the now-Tiriyó groups lived between Brazil and French Guiana until they were driven out by the Oyampi, a Tupi-Guaranian group allied with the Portuguese. Together, the Portuguese and Oyampi drove these groups westward, and they mingled with the groups that were in the area to form the modern Tiriyó group.
As such, the Tiriyó established contact relatively early with runaway slave groups that settled in the area around the end of the 18th century. They maintained regular commercial relations with one group, the Ndyuka, and for many years they were the only contact the Tiriyó had with foreign populations. The first recorded contact between the Tiriyó and a European took place in 1843 between a "Drio" village and Robert Schomburgk; this and the meeting between French explorer Jules Crevaux and a few "Trio" were the only two points of contact between Tiriyó and Europeans in the 19th century. Subsequent contact between Europeans and Tiriyó in the first half of the twentieth century produced ethnographic and linguistic studies of the region and Tiriyó subgroups in particular. After the "exploratory phase" of contact came the "missionary phase", wherein newly built airstrips facilitated contact between missionaries and the Tiriyó. These missions tried to concentrate the Tiriyó population in larger villages to more easily convert them to Christianity, and over time, other Indigenous groups such as the Akuriyó joined them here.
Today, the Tiriyó have a high degree of independence because their settlements are difficult to access. However, they are interested in reinforcing relationships with the foreign world.
Classification Tiriyó has been classified as belonging to the Taranoan group of the Guianan sub-branch of Cariban, together with Karihona (Carijona), in Colombia, and Akuriyó, in Suriname, the former with a few, and the latter with apparently no, speakers left. Gildea (2012) lists Tiriyó and Trió as distinct languages.
Research The first wordlist of Tiriyó was compiled by Jules Crevaux in 1882, consisting of 31 entries including two sentences in Ndyuka-Tiriyó, a pidgin language. In 1909, Claudius Henricus De Goeje wrote a short grammar of Tiriyó alongside a longer wordlist of around 500 entries that he had published previously in 1904. In-depth linguistic studies of Tiriyó were not written until later in the 20th century, when Ernest Migliazza published an investigation of the phonology of Tiriyó in 1965, as did Morgan Jones in 1972. The two dialects of Tiriyó were first described in that work by Jones. A short morphological study by Ruth Wallace was published in 1980.
Sergio Meira has conducted a great deal of research into Tiriyó, including in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2005. His descriptive grammar of Tiriyó (1999) was the first major text on the language, and describes aspects of Tiriyó's phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. It also provides a list of words commonly borrowed into Tiriyó, and a preliminary English-Tiriyó dictionary. Eithne Carlin has also written a descriptive grammar of Tiriyó, that focuses on Tiriyó as spoken by people in Suriname. Carlin has also published other works about Tiriyó (Carlin 1997, 1999, 2003, 2006, 2011), primarily concerned with semantics and sociolinguistics.
Documentation Tiriyó has been partially documented as part of Meira's research with the Leiden University, in conjunction with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. This documentation began in 1993 under Dr. Spike Gildea's Northern Brazilian Cariban Languages Documentation Project, and continued through 1999. Meira's documentation included specific focus on stress patterns, contrastive demonstratives, and locative postpositions. There have been relatively few ethnographic studies on the Tiriyó, with the exception of the works by missionary Protásio Frikel and English anthropologist Peter Rivière. Between the 1950s and 1970s, Frikel wrote seven works (Frikel 1957, 1958, 1960, 1961a,b, 1964, 1971, 1973) relating to the Tiriyó. Rivière has published a number of works (Rivière 1963, 1966, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1981a,b, 1984, 1987, 1988, 1994, 1995a,b, 2000) beginning in 1963, notably Marriage Among the Trio. In his writing, he addresses errors made by Frikel.
Dialects There seem to be two main dialects in the Tiriyó-speaking area, called by Jones (1972) Eastern or Tapanahoni basin, and Western or Sipaliwini basin dialects, and by Meira (2000, to appear) K-Tiriyó and H-Tiriyó. The main difference thus far reported is phonological: the different realization of what were (historically) clusters involving and a stop. Grammatical and/or lexical differences may also exist, but the examples thus far produced are disputed.
Demographically, H-Tiriyó is the most important dialect (~ 60% of the speakers). It is the dialect spoken in the village of Kwamalasamutu, Suriname, and in the villages along the Western Paru river (Tawainen or Missão Tiriós, Kaikui Tëpu, Santo Antônio) and also along the Marapi river (Kuxare, Yawa, etc.). K-Tiriyó is spoken in the villages along the Eastern Paru river (Mataware, and some people at Bonna) in Brazil, and in the villages of Tepoe and Paloemeu in Suriname.
Tiriyo was also a basis of the Ndyuka-Tiriyó Pidgin.
Phonology Tiriyó has seven vowels and ten consonants, as shown in the chart below. (Orthographic symbols in bold, IPA values in square brackets.)
Vowels Front Central Back Close Mid Open
The vowels (a, e, i, o, u) are very close to their usual values in, e.g., Spanish. The central vowel ï is usually , but is also heard, especially after a velar consonant; The central vowel ë is usually , but or are also common.
Consonants Bilabial Dental Palatal Velar Glottal Nasal Plosive Fricative Tap Approximant
The fricative shows a considerable amount of variation. Some speakers have , others have or , or even . The following vowel also influences the pronunciation of : -like realizations are more frequent before and . The rhotic r is often retroflex () and may have some laterality (); simple taps () are also heard. The approximant w has usually no rounding (), and sometimes (especially if followed by e or i) some friction The glottal fricative is the most obvious difference between the two main dialects. K-Tiriyó is a dialect without ; where H-Tiriyó has an , K-Tiriyó shows a VV sequence (realized as a long vowel). In H-Tiriyó, each h-cluster - hp, ht, hk (historically , , ) - has a different realization: , , (i.e., with p and k, [h] is weakly realized and spirantizes the following plosive; with t, is stronger and there is no spirantization). Older H-Tiriyó speakers have a fourth cluster hs , with a weakly realized , while younger H-Tiriyó speakers have ~ (K-Tiriyó speakers have only ); all in all, its status is, however, marginal. The examples in the table below illustrate these various realizations: Proto-formH-TiriyóK-TiriyóGlossfireBrazil nutskin~~annatto
Phonotactics The basic syllable template is (C1)V1(V2)(C2) -- i.e., the possible syllable types are: V1 V1V2 V1C2 V1V2C2 C1V1 C1V1V2 C1V1C2 C1V1V2C2.
Onsetless syllables (V1, V1V2, V1C2, V1V2C2) occur only word-initially; all vowels except ï are possible in this position. Ex.: ; ; ; ; ; . The most frequent syllable type is C1V1, in which all vowels and all consonants (except h) are possible.Ex.: , , , , , , Vowel sequences (V1V2) can be made of identical vowels (V1 = V2), in which case they are realized as long vowels. In this case, no coda consonants are possible (i.e., no *(C1)VVC2). Exs.: , , , , , , .
Stress Tiriyó stress follows a rhythmic pattern of the kind Hayes (1995) calls iambic. Phonetically: In (C)V-only words, every second syllable from the beginning of the word is stressed, except the final syllable, which is never stressed (extrametric). A non-(C)V syllable anywhere in the word attracts stress (except in the always unstressed final position) and disturbs the pattern, forcing it to restart as if a new word had begun. Bisyllabic words do not have obvious stress.
Examples (acute accents mark stress, and colons length): Syllable type Underlying formPhonetic Gloss(C)V-only 'toucan sp.' 'you all helped him/her/it'non-(C)V-only 'you woke him/her up' 'we (I+you) were' 'you bit him/her/it'
Note that some words apparently follow the opposite – trochaic – pattern (e.g., above). For these words, an underlying sequence of identical vowels is proposed. Cognate words from related languages provide evidence for this analysis: compare the Tiriyó stem with e.g. Waiwai, Katxuyana, Hixkaryana , Panare , Karihona , suggesting a historical process of syllable reduction with subsequent compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel.
Since stress depends only on the type and number of syllables, morphological processes that involve syllabic prefixes or suffixes affect stress:
→
In Hayes' framework, one could argue that stress placement is based on pairs of syllables (feet) consisting of either two (C)V (light) or one non-(C)V (heavy) syllables, except for the last syllable, which is extrametric, i.e. never forms a foot. This would explain the lack of stress in bisyllabic words: an initial light syllable, left alone by the extrametricity of the final syllable, cannot form a foot by itself and remains unstressed.
Reduplication Reduplication in Tiriyó affects verbs (regularly) and also nouns and adverbials (irregularly: not all of them). On verbs, it usually marks iteration or repetition (e.g.: , ); on nouns and adverbials, several examples of an entity, or several instances of a phenomenon (e.g.: , ; , (including also the plural marker -ton; see below).
Formally, there are two reduplicative patterns, termed internal and external reduplication. External reduplication is a regular process that copies the first two moras of a complete word (i.e., the first two syllables if they are light, or the first syllable if it is heavy). Coda consonants are not reduplicated: the preceding vowel is copied as long (i.e. as a VV sequence). If a syllable contains two vowels, some (older?) speakers copy both vowels, while other (younger?) speakers copy only the first vowel and lengthen it (i.e. turn it into a VV sequence). Base Gloss Reduplication Gloss , or:
Internal reduplication affects the interior of a word. In most cases, it can be seen as affecting the stem prior to the addition of person- or voice-marking prefixes; in some cases, however, it affects some pre-stem material as well (cf. the table below, in which '+' signs separate affixes from the stem in the first column). In many, but not all, cases, internal reduplication may result from the simplification of external reduplication: > . (Some examples from Carlin 2004 support this hypothesis.) Base Gloss Reduplication Gloss (stem: ) (stem: )
Finally, some cases are idiosyncratic and probably need to be listed independently (e.g., , , ).
Morphophonology