Resígaro language

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Resígaro is an Arawakan language spoken in the department of Loreto in Peru. It is believed to be nearly extinct as of 2017 with only one remaining speaker.[2][3]

Resígaro
Native toPeru
Native speakers
1 (2017)[1]
Arawakan
Language codes
ISO 639-3rgr
Glottologresi1247
ELPResígaro

Aikhenvald (1999) classifies it among the Western Nawiki Upper Amazonian languages. Kaufman (1994) had made it a separate branch of Upper Amazonian.

During the Putumayo genocide, many Resígaro people were enslaved by Julio Cesar Arana's rubber company. Resígaro's entrapped by Arana's company were dedicated to the extraction of rubber at the stations of La Sabana and Santa Catalina, which was managed by the Rodriguez brothers.[4] In 1910, a manager of Arana's company told Roger Casement that the Rodriguez brothers had killed hundreds of indigenous people.[5]

On November 25, 2016 the last female speaker of Resígaro, Rosa Andrade, was brutally murdered in a beheading at the age of 67. Her niece reported “She was beheaded. Her head was not found, neither her heart.”[6]

The only other remaining speaker known was Andrade's brother, Pablo Andrade, who still lives. He and his late sister had been preparing a project with the Ministry of Culture to document their language since October 2016, and to update books on grammar and an outdated dictionary made in the 1950s by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, that promoted the translation of the Bible.[6]

Language contact

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Resígaro has many morphological borrowings from Bora, such as pronouns, number markings, and case markers. However, there are relatively few lexical loanwords.[7]

Phonology

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Consonants[8]
Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Plosive aspirated
voiceless p t k ʔ
voiced b d g
Affricate aspirated t͡sʰ c͡çʰ
voiceless t͡s c͡ç
voiced d͡z ɟ͡ʝ
Fricative voiceless f s ç h
voiced v ʝ
Nasal voiceless ɲ̥
voiced m n ɲ
Vowels
Front Central Back
High i u
Mid e o
Low a

References

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  1. ^ Resígaro at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)  
  2. ^ International, Survival. "Peru: Last female speaker of indigenous Amazonian language murdered". www.survivalinternational.org. Archived from the original on 2022-01-21. Retrieved 2020-08-04.
  3. ^ Fowks, Jacqueline (December 21, 2016). "Asesinada en Perú la última mujer hablante de resígaro". Archived from the original on March 22, 2022. Retrieved August 4, 2020 – via elpais.com.
  4. ^ United States. Department of State (1913). Slavery in Peru: Message from the President of the United States Transmitting Report of the Secretary of State, with Accompanying Papers, Concerning the Alleged Existence of Slavery in Peru. U.S. Government Printing Office.
  5. ^ Casement, Roger (1997). The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement. Anaconda Editions. p. 424. ISBN 1901990052.
  6. ^ a b "Beheaded in Peru: Rosa Andrade, Last Female Speaker of Resigaro Language - Indian Country Media Network". indiancountrymedianetwork.com. Archived from the original on 2018-01-09. Retrieved 2017-05-23.
  7. ^ Seifart, Frank. 2011. Bora loans in Resígaro: Massive morphological and little lexical borrowing in a moribund Arawakan language Archived 2022-01-21 at the Wayback Machine. Cadernos de Etnolingüística Série Monografias, 2.
  8. ^ "Allin, Trevor R. 1976. A grammar of Res'igaro. Horsleys Green, England: Summer Institute of Linguistics. 47–48pp" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-12-06. Retrieved 2022-05-23.
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  • Resígaro DoReCo corpus compiled by Frank Seifart. Audio recordings of narrative texts, with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level and translations.