Last updated: 2019-11-04
Background
Language Family: Arawakan / Maipuran / Northern Maaipuran / Inland
- Piapoco is spoken in Guainía and Vichada departments of Eastern Colombia.
Phonology
Consonants
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Place of Articulation
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Manner of Articulation
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Labial
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Alveolar
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Palatal
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Velar
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Glottal
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Stops
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p b
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t d
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k
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Affricates
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ts
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Fricatives
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s
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h
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Nasals
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m
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n
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Flaps
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ɾ
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Approximants
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w
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l
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j
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Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.
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Vowels
- /o/ appears in some loanwords (Klumpp 2019, 4).
- Vowel length is phonemic in Piapoco (Klumpp 1985, 22–23). Long vowels are indicated by duplicate graphemes.
- Stress and tone appear to be one in the same (i.e. the suprasegmental features overlap) (Klumpp 2019, 5). That is, high stress/high tone is marked by an acute accent (´) over the vowel, while low stress/low tone is marked by a grave accent (`) over the vowel. Klumpp (1995) explains that stress is the contrastive feature that is accompanied by changes in tone (p. vi), suggesting that tonal differences may be a by-product of stress. Although there is this ambiguity, I have opted to include tone as a contrastive feature in the rules.
- Syllables (vowels) not marked with either accent fluctuate freely in terms of tone (Klumpp 2019, 2).
- Accents are only atop the first vowel of a long vowel sequence (Klumpp 2019, 5).
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Front
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Central
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Back
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High
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i
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u
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Mid
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e
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Low
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a
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Alphabet
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Grapheme
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Phoneme
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a
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/a/
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b
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/b/
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c
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/k/
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d
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/d/
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e
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/e/
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i
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/i/
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j
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/h/
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l
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/l/
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m
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/m/
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n
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/n/
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p
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/p/
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r
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/ɾ/
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s
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/s/
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t
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/t/
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u
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/u/
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w
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/w/
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y
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/j/
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Digraph
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ch
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/ts/
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qu
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/k/
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Syllable Structure
- Syllables in Piapoco follow the order of (C)V (Klumpp 2019, 2).
Lenition Rules
- /h/ is often deleted, especially by younger generations (Klumpp 2019, 3).
Misc. Rules
- /k/ often palatalizes between /i/ and /a/ (Klumpp 2019, 2).
- /ts/ and [tʃ] are said to be in free variation (Klumpp 2019, 3).
- /w/ becomes a fricative [β] preceding front vowels (Klumpp 2019, 4).
References
Klumpp, Deloris. 1985. “From Phonology to Discourse: Studies in Six Colombian Languages.” In, edited by Ruth Margaret Brend, 19–29. Summer Institute of Linguistics.
———. 1995. Vocabulario Piapoco-Español. Accociación Instituto Linguistico de Verano.
———. 2019. A Grammar of Piapoco. Edited by Barbara E. Hollenbach. SIL International.