The Pekodian languages are a subgroup of the Cariban language family. The languages are spoken in Mato Grosso and Pará states of Brazil and make up the southernmost branch of Cariban.
Meira and Chousou-Polydouri (2015) consider Pekodian to have descended from Cariban migrations that came from the north, as Cariban linguistic diversity is concentrated in northern South America.Meira S, Birchall J, Chousou-Polydouri S. 2015. A character-based internal classification of the Cariban family. Talk presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguisticae Europaea, Leiden, Netherlands, Sept. 4.
The term Pekodian was coined in 2005 by Sérgio Meira and Bruna Franchetto on the basis of a cognate word for ‘woman’ found in these languages, respectively Bakairi pekodo and Ikpeng petkom, but not found in any of the other Cariban languages compared against them.
Languages The Pekodian languages are:Meira, Sérgio. 2006. A família lingüística Caribe (Karíb). Revista de Estudos e Pesquisas v.3, n.1/2, p.157-174. Brasília: FUNAI. (PDF)Gildea, Spike. 2012. "Linguistic studies in the Cariban family", in Campbell & Grondona, eds, The Indigenous Languages of South America: A Comprehensive Guide. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.Jolkesky, Marcelo Pinho De Valhery. 2016. Estudo arqueo-ecolinguístico das terras tropicais sul-americanas. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Brasília.
Bakairi Ikpeng Pará Arára Yarumá (Suyá) Kuikúro (Kuikuro–Kalapalo, Matipuhy)
Internal classification Carvalho classifies the Pekodian languages as follows.
Pekodian Bakairí Kampot dialect cluster Ikpeng Arára Apiaká do Tocantins Parirí Yarumá
The term Kampot is coined by Carvalho (2020) from the lexical innovation *kampot ‘fire’ defining the dialect cluster.
Sound changes A number of sound changes are shared between Bakairí and Ikpeng: In intervocalic position, Proto-Cariban *p becomes w, *t becomes d (further developing to r in Ikpeng), and *k becomes g. Proto-Cariban *r becomes l in certain (as-yet undetermined) shared environments. Proto-Cariban *w becomes p word-initially (though there are some exceptions in Ikpeng). Proto-Cariban *t palatalizes to tʃ before e and i. (Bakairí further develops tʃ to ʃ, ʒ, s, or z.) Possibly, the Proto-Cariban sequence *nu-ru reduced to *n-ru, yielding Bakairí nu and Ikpeng ŋ-ru, although these results can also be explained in other ways.
Loanwords Pekodian languages have various loanwords from non-Cariban languages, including Juruna and Arawakan languages.
Pekodian may have also influenced Bororoan and other non-Cariban language families.
References