The Cabécar language is an indigenous American language of the Chibchan language family spoken by the Cabécar people in the inland Turrialba Region, Cartago Province, Costa Rica. As of 2007, 2,000 speakers were monolingual. It is the only indigenous language in Costa Rica with monolingual adults. The language is also known by its dialect names Chirripó, Estrella, Telire, and Ujarrás.
History Cabécar is considered to be one of a few "Chibcha-speaking tribes", categorized by similarities in the languages that they speak. Other Chibcha speaking tribes include the Bribri and the Boruca, also of Costa Rica. It is believed that the languages of the Chibcha speaking tribes shared a common ancestor around 8,000 years ago. However, differences in the languages are thought to have come about from the influence of outside people, including influences from Mesoamerica.
Geographic distribution Cabécar is an endangered language spoken in Costa Rica. It is spoken by the Cabécar people, an indigenous group located near the Talamancan mountains of Costa Rica.
Dialects and varieties There are two different dialects of Cabécar, each of which has more narrow dialects within it. One of these is spoken in the north, while the other is spoken in southern parts of Costa Rica.
Phonology Cabécar uses a Latin alphabet with umlauts for (ë, ö), and tildes for (ã, ẽ, ĩ, õ, ũ).Native-languages.org Cabécar has twelve vowels, five of which are nasalized.
Consonants BilabialDentalAlveolarRetroflexPostalveolarVelarGlottalPlosiveplain voiced Fricative Affricate Flap Nasal
Vowels +VowelsFrontCentralBackHigh Near-high Mid-high Low
Grammar Cabécar has a canonical word order of subject–object–verb.
References
Resources
External links Recording of "2 children's chants of the Cabécar Indians" from the Indigenous Languages of Costa Rica Collection of Laura Cervantes at AILLA. Audio sample Numeral list 1-20 Christian Bible - Matthew 2 Video of documentary of Cabecar songs Video with audio and text of Christian hymn "Gloria" in Cabecar Interview discussing work on Cabecar dictionary (in Spanish) Cabécar DoReCo corpus compiled by Juan Diego Quesada, Stavros Skopeteas, Carolina Pasamonik, Carolin Brokmann and Florian Fischer. Audio recordings of narrative texts with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level, translations, and time-aligned morphological annotations.