Pirahã (also spelled Pirahá, Pirahán), or Múra-Pirahã, is the indigenous language of the Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. The Pirahã live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon River. Pirahã is the only surviving dialect of the Mura language, all others having died out in the last few centuries as most groups of the Mura people have shifted to Portuguese. Pirahã can therefore be considered its own language now. Suspected relatives, such as Matanawi, are also extinct. Pirahã is estimated to have between 250 and 380 speakers. It is not in immediate danger of extinction, as its use is vigorous and the Pirahã community is mostly monolingual. The Pirahã language is the subject of various controversial claims: for example, that it provides evidence against linguistic relativity. The controversy is compounded by the difficulty of learning the language; the number of linguists with field experience in Pirahã is very small. Consequently, many claims which identify Pirahã as exhibiting features contradictory to the most normative understanding of human language cognition have not as of yet engendered considerable confidence.
Name Speakers refer to their language as Apáitisí, and to their own ethnic group as Hiáitihí.
Knowledge of other languages Daniel Everett states that most of the remaining Pirahã speakers are monolingual, knowing only a few words of Portuguese. The anthropologist Marco Antônio Gonçalves, who lived with the Pirahã for 18 months over several years, writes that most of the men understand Portuguese, though not all of them are able to express themselves in the language. Women have little understanding of Portuguese and never use it as a form of expression. The men developed a contact 'language' or pidgin that allowed them to communicate with regional populations, mixing words from Pirahã, Portuguese and Nheengatu, the Amazonian General Language. Everett states that the Pirahã use a very rudimentary Portuguese lexicon with Pirahã grammar when speaking Portuguese and that their Portuguese is so limited to very specific topics that they are rightly called monolingual, without contradicting Gonçalves (since they can communicate on a very narrow range of topics using a very restricted lexicon). Future research on developing bilingualism (Pirahã-Portuguese) in the community, along the lines of Sakel and Gonçalves, will provide valuable data for the discussion on speakers' grammatical competence (e.g. regarding the effect of culture). Although Gonçalves quotes whole stories told by the Pirahã, Everett has claimed that the Portuguese in these stories is not a literal transcription of what was said, but a free translation from the pidgin Portuguese of the Pirahã. In a 2012 study, Jeanette Sakel studied the use of Portuguese by a group of Pirahã speakers and reported that, when speaking Portuguese, most Pirahã speakers employ simple syntactic constructions, but some more proficient speakers utilize constructions that could be analysed as complex constructions, such as subordinating conjunctions and complement clauses.
Phonology
The Pirahã language is one of the phonologically simplest languages known, comparable to Rotokas (New Guinea) and the Lakes Plain languages such as Obokuitai. There is a claim that Pirahã has as few as ten phonemes, one fewer than Rotokas, or even as few as nine for women, but this requires analyzing [k] as an underlying /hi/ and having /h/ invariably substituted for /s/ in female speech. Although such a phenomenon is odd cross-linguistically, Ian Maddieson has found in studying Pirahã data that /k/ does indeed exhibit an unusual distribution in the language. When languages have inventories as small and allophonic variation as great as in Pirahã and Rotokas, different linguists may have very different ideas as to the nature of their phonological systems.
Tone The tone-bearing unit in Pirahã is the mora. The "ten phoneme" claim also does not consider the tones of Pirahã, at least two of which are phonemic (marked by an acute accent and either unmarked or marked by a grave accent in Daniel Everett's works), bringing the number of phonemes to at least twelve. According to Steven N. Sheldon there are three tones, high (¹), mid (²) and low (³). Silva (2014) posits four phonemic tones in Pirahã, two level tones, high and low, and two contour tones, rising and falling, the latter of which are produced when morae of differing tones follow the other. Pirahã can be whistled, hummed, or encoded in music. In fact, Keren Everett believes that current research on the language misses much of its meaning by paying little attention to the language's prosody. Consonants and vowels may be omitted altogether and the meaning conveyed solely through variations in pitch, stress, and rhythm. She says that mothers teach their children the language through constantly singing the same musical patterns.
Vowels
Sequences of two vowels are bimoraic and therefore have two tone-bearing units; thus, each unit has its own level tone.
Consonants The segmental phonemes are presented in the following table. Phonemes not universally recognized as such are in (parentheses).
The glottal stop [ʔ] is inserted predictably at the start of a word. Salles (2023) also treats the two glides /j, w/ as phonemic.
Everett posits that [k] is an allophone of the sequence /hi/. Women sometimes use /h/ instead of /s/. The number of phonemes is at most thirteen, matching Hawaiian, if [k] is counted as a phoneme and there are just two tones; if [k] is not phonemic, there are twelve phonemes, one more than the number found in Rotokas, or eleven among women who uniformly replace /s/ with /h/. (English, by comparison, has thirty to forty-five, depending on dialect.) However, many of the phonemes show a great deal of allophonic variation.
For instance, vowels are nasalized after the glottal consonants /h/ and /ʔ/ (written h and x). Also,
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