Shipibo (also Shipibo-Conibo, Shipibo-Konibo) is a Panoan language spoken in Peru and Brazil by approximately 26,000 speakers.

History In 1557, the Spanish explorer Juan de Salinas y Loyola encountered the Kokama and Pariache; the latter have been identified as Konibo. He described them as though they had been organized into a chiefdom. Throughout the 18th century, the Shipibo, Konibo, and Xetebo allied with the Kokama to defend their territory from the Spaniards; they were successful until 1790. Afterwards, the Franciscans missionized them until their expulsion in the 1820s. They produced the first surviving works on Shipibo-Konibo, including a Konibo grammar sketch and vocabulary in 1800, though these would remain unpublished until a century later.

Dialects

Shipibo has three attested dialects:

Shipibo 'tamarin monkey ones' and Konibo (Conibo) 'eel ones', which have merged Kapanawa of the Tapiche River, which is obsolescent

Extinct Xipináwa (Shipinawa) is thought to have been a dialect as well, but there is no linguistic data.

Phonology

Vowels

+ Monophthong phonemes FrontCentral Back Close Mid Open In connected speech, two adjacent vowels may be realized as a rising diphthong. and are lower than their cardinal counterparts (in addition to being more front in the latter case): , , is more front than cardinal : , whereas is more close and more central than cardinal . The first three vowels tend to be somewhat more central in closed syllables, whereas before coronal consonants (especially ) can be as central as .

Nasalization The oral vowels are phonetically nasalized after a nasal consonant, but the phonological behaviour of these allophones is different from the nasal vowel phonemes . Oral vowels in syllables preceding syllables with nasal vowels are realized as nasal, but not when a consonant other than intervenes.

Unstressed vowels The second of two adjacent unstressed vowels is often elided. Unstressed vowels may be devoiced or even elided between two voiceless obstruents.

Consonants

+ Consonant phonemes Labial Dental/Alveolar Retroflex Palato-alveolar Dorsal Glottal Nasal Plosive Affricate Fricative Approximant

are bilabial, whereas is labial–velar. is most typically a fricative , but other realizations (such as an approximant , a stop and an affricate ) also appear. The stop realization is most likely to appear in word-initial stressed syllables, whereas the approximant realization appears most often as onsets to non-initial unstressed syllables. are alveolar , whereas is dental . The distinction can be described as an apical–laminal one. is velar, whereas is palatal. Before nasal vowels, are nasalized and may be even realized close to nasal stops . is realized as before , as before and as before . It does not occur before . is a very variable sound: Intervocalically, it is realized either as continuant, with or without weak frication ( or ). Sometimes (especially in the beginning of a stressed syllable) it can be realized as a postalveolar affricate , or a stop-approximant sequence . It can also be realized as a postalveolar flap .

References

Bibliography

Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. . Elias-Ulloa, Jose (2000). El Acento en Shipibo (Stress in Shipibo). Thesis. Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima - Peru. Elias-Ulloa, Jose (2005). Theoretical Aspects of Panoan Metrical Phonology: Disyllabic Footing and Contextual Syllable Weight. Ph.D. Dissertation. Rutgers University. ROA 804 .

Kaufman, Terrence. (1990). Language history in South America: What we know and how to know more. In D. L. Payne (Ed.), Amazonian linguistics: Studies in lowland South American languages (pp. 13–67). Austin: University of Texas Press. . Kaufman, Terrence. (1994). The native languages of South America. In C. Mosley & R. E. Asher (Eds.), Atlas of the world's languages (pp. 46–76). London: Routledge. Loriot, James and Barbara E. Hollenbach. 1970. "Shipibo paragraph structure." Foundations of Language 6: 43–66. (This was the seminal Discourse Analysis paper taught at SIL in 1956–7.) Loriot, James, Erwin Lauriault, and Dwight Day, compilers. 1993. Diccionario shipibo - castellano. Serie Lingüística Peruana, 31. Lima: Ministerio de Educación and Instituto Lingüístico de Verano. 554 p. (Spanish zip-file available online http://www.sil.org/americas/peru/show_work.asp?id=928474530143&Lang=eng) This has a complete grammar published in English by SIL only available through SIL.

External links

Shipibo-Conibo at Ethnologue Lengua Shipibo at Proel Shipibo-Conibo (Intercontinental Dictionary Series)