Chapter 10: The Sounds of Pirahã, by Emmy Pruitt
The native South American language of Pirahã is interesting first and foremost as a language isolate, or a language with no known related language (Endangered Languages). Located in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest of Brazil, in the state of Amazonas, the Pirahã language is spoken by 200 to 400 people. Multiple sources document whistling within the language, but there is evidence of other speech channels present in the language, including whistling, humming, singing, and yelling (O'Neill). The list of unique features is long: claims of not containing recursion; lack of a numeric system; its small phonemic inventory; and sex-differences pertaining to consonants.
2. Consonants
Pirahã is known for being a language with a relatively small phonological inventory, containing only 8 consonants (Ethnologue). Below, a modified IPA chart shows the consonants present in the language.
p - unvoiced bilabial plosive
b - voiced bilabial plosive
k - unvoiced velar plosive
g - voiced velar plosive
h - unvoiced glottal fricative
ʔ̠ - unvoiced glottal plosive
t* - unvoiced alveolar plosive | unvoiced dentalized alveolar plosive
s* - unvoiced alveolar fricative | unvoiced dentalized alveolar fricative
*The /s/ and /t/ is Pirahã may or may not be dentalized, and it appears to be an allophonic variation within the language rather than phonemic (Inventory Piraha). Dentalization occurs when the placement of a consonant is closer to the back of the teeth than the alveolar ridge (Williamson).
The audio clip above has a Pirahã speaker saying the following words. Note that the double [i] in this context distinguishes long vowels from short:
pii - water
tii - residue
ʔii - wood/thing
bii - blood
Male vs. Female Speakers
In Pirahã speech between men and women, the male speakers will use the phoneme /s/, while the female speakers substitute /h/ for /s/. Men will use both /h/ and /s/ (Futrell). In the following clip, a female speaker of Pirahã says words written with an [s] as an /h/, demonstrating the pattern to be correct. It is unclear if there are more sex-related differences in Pirahã speech. The following two clips show a female speaker and a male speaker both saying [ʔísiisí], and the female speaker can be heard saying something more similar to [ʔíhiihí] (UCLA).
[ʔísiisí] - body fat/oil
3. Vowels
Pirahã contains 3 vowels: i, a, o
i - close, front, unrounded
a - open, front, unrounded
o - mid, back, rounded
The audio clips below have Pirahã speakers saying the following words to demonstrate the 3 vowels present in the language:
1. [bigí] - earth
2. [bogí] - my breast
3. [sabí] - angry
Vowel Length
As mentioned previously, Pirahã contains both long and short vowels. The audio clip shown below has a female speaker saying Pirahan word for the first person pronoun, [ti], and the word for residue, [tii], showing the contrastive nature of these two types of vowels in Pirahã (UCLA).
Tone
According to Silva, Pirahã contains four phonemic tones: low, high, falling, and rising. Each syllable within the language contains a tone. Although previous linguists have argued that Pirahã is a two-tone system, Silva argues that from analyzing the data, falling and rising contour tones are also present, but further data is necessary to analyze.
4. Allophonic Alterations
Dentalization
Dentalized and "undentalized" [t] and [s] are allophones within Pirahã, with the difference between the two not seeming to have contrastive difference. There is a lack of articles pertaining to this topic to thoroughly analyze the specific circumstances in which the dentalized consonants are used. The phonemes /s/ and /t/ are only represented in 5% of the words in the language each, which adds to the difficulty in comparing the audio examples we have to compare the dentalized allophones of /s/ and /t/ (Inventory Piraha).
Free Variation
According to Silva, there is "free variation observed in obstruents and nasals in post-pausal position, namely (/Ɂ,g/ → [n], /b/→ [m])" (2). The reasoning for this variation has been debated, but the position of the sounds in the mouth might explain: "the glottal and the velar do not have a place of articulation feature [dorsal] specified and as a result they have the same output [n]" (2). Thus, the nasals [n] and [m] are allophonic in this language.
Nasalized Vowels
Despite not having any phonemic nasalized vowels, "Pirahã does nasalize vowels optionally in syllables that contain [h] and [Ɂ]" (Sandolo 10). Linguists are not certain why these vowels nasalize, but they theorize it may be due to being produced lower in the mouth, but others still claim that nasality is the norm, but that most of the consonants in Pirahã block this from being the case (Sandolo 10-12).
5. Syllable and Syllable Structure
Due to its small phonemic inventory, Pirahã may appear to be comparatively simple, but Pirahã is just as complex as other languages. "The placement of word stress is related to syllable weight," which "is determined by the nature of the segments" (O'Neill 350). For example, heavy syllables, or "syllables with long vowels or/and an approximant, are the only syllables to contain contour tones" (Silva 12) There are five combinations of consonant and vowel placements that each hold weight and these all correspond with the length of the syllable, such as consonant-vowel-vowel, vowel-vowel, or consonant-vowel. All of these combinations determine where the stress is placed within the word (O'Neill 350).
6. Focus on Channels in Pirahã
In Pirahã, there are multiple channels to express oneself, including normal speech, humming, whistling, singing, and yelling. While most languages have these types of sounds, speakers of Pirahã use all of these channels to share linguistic messages in specific contexts. According to O'Neill, whistling speech is primarily used by men in the tribe hunting with one another. They do so by whistling with the same tone, syllable weight, and stress of the words. When there is important news to share, a musical channel may be used in which the tones are exaggerated (353-355). "All syllables are systematically reduced in hum speech to a bilabial nasal /m/ which may carry both tone and stress"; It is used primarily in private settings (354).
Everett, Daniel L. “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã.” Current Anthropology, vol. 46, no. 4, 2005, pp. 1–69. Academic Search Complete, https://doi.org/10.1086/431525. Accessed Nov. 2021.
de Carvalho, Fernando O. “Vowel Acoustics in Pirahã.” Revista de Estudos Da Linguagem, vol. 18, no. 1, Jan. 2010, pp. 11–33. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.libproxy.siue.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=71160300&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Frank, Michael C., et al. “Number as a Cognitive Technology: Evidence from Pirahã Language and Cognition.” Cognition, vol. 108, no. 3, 2008, pp. 819–824., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.04.007.
Futrell, Richard, et al. "A Corpus Investigation of Syntactic Embedding in Pirahã." PLoS ONE, vol. 11, no. 3, Mar. 2016, pp. 1-20. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0145289.
“Inventory Piraha.” Edited by Steven Moran and Daniel McCloy, Phoible 2.0, https://phoible.org/inventories/view/477.
O’Neill, Gareth. “Humming, Whistling, Singing, and Yelling in Pirahã Context and Channels of Communication in FDG.” Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), vol. 24, no. 2, 2014, pp. 349–375. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.24.2.08nei. Accessed 2021.
“Pirahã.” Edited by David M. Eberhard et al., Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International, 2021, https://www-ethnologue-com.libproxy.siue.edu/language/myp.
“Pirahã.” Endangered Languages Project, https://www.endangeredlanguages.com/lang/2952.
“Pirahã.” The UCLA Lab Archive, UCLA Department of Linguistics, 2007, http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/Language/MYP/myp.html.
Sandalo, Filomena, and Maria Abaurre. “Orality Spreading in Pirahã.” Línguas Indígenas Americanas, vol. 10, no. 7, July 2010, https://doi.org/10.20396/liames.v10i1.1506.
Silva, Glauber Romling da. “A Feature Geometric Analysis of Pirahã Phonology and Tonology (Mura).” Revista Linguística, vol. 10, no. 2, Dec. 2014.
Williamson, Graham. “Dentalization.” SLT Info, 9 Nov. 2015, https://www.sltinfo.com/allo101-dentalization/.