Warao language
Spoken in
- Isolated Languages Warao
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Wba
The Warao is an indigenous language of South America, which is spoken in the Orinoco Delta and adjacent areas north-east of Venezuela and Guyana from the Warao. The Speaker of the Warao are the indigenous people of the Delta and colonize the area for at least 9,000 years.
Language area and speaker
It is estimated that approximately 30,000 Warao live, where the trend is rising. The Warao are the second largest Native American group in Venezuela, a country about 1.5% Indians live in the. The language therefore has the status of a minority language.
According to the latest reliable census, 90% of the Venezuelan Warao speak Waraosprache and 48 % of them are bilingual in Spanish and Warao. In the central Delta, the region in which Capuchin missionaries since the 1930s entertain boarding schools, the proportion of Warao who no longer use their language in daily contact with each other is higher than in the western Delta. First of all speakers who have migrated to the slums of the district capitals Tucupita and Barrancas, enter the language to increasingly since they expect from your use of Spanish, especially for their children social benefits.
The approximately 1,000 Warao in Guyana all live in close contact with non- Indians, and all speak English. Many of them are bilingual in English and Warao, not a few even trilingual in Warao, English and Spanish. Even here, however, is reported by the tendency to abandon the Warao.
The Waraosprache as the language of an oral culture
The Warao is like all Amerindian languages, the language of an oral culture. This means that the Warao have produced no written culture, even if oral texts were transcribed the Warao of missionaries and anthropologists and published in printed form. In oral cultures of South America is a close relationship between storytelling and performing arts, and they have a very rich oral literature.
This includes among the Warao, among others, different language styles and genres. A major difference of Waraoerzählungen is about the difference between denobo ( deje nobo " old stories " ), the stories of mythological time and deje jiro ( " new stories " ) or deje kwamotane Abane ( "Tales from above "). The latter include everyday stories, gossip and funny stories that are similar to our genre of wit.
Further, the Warao also knows a secret ritual language that applies during important religious rituals or in the healing and damage chants of the shaman. Also, the dirge, which is largely sung by women of the lineage of the dead, is its own form of language that is little understood by outsiders.
Social and political status of Waraosprache
Currently, the majority of the Speaker of the Warao lives in pure Warao villages where the language is often the only means of communication with each other Warao. However, outside of the villages in the district towns and the administration and even in school education in Warao areas has Waraosprache be able to conquer no place basically until today.
For Guyana, there have been no projects bilingual education ( Forte 2000). In Venezuela, was indeed created for this purpose in the early 1980s, the legal basis, but so far the so-called " FRICTION " ( Régimen de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe ) could not enforce due to lack of political support. The current government of Hugo Chávez Frías has a wide -scale literacy program started, which penetrates into the Warao villages, but this is also in Spanish. After all, he has been upgraded as part of the constitution of a new Venezuelan identity, the Amerindian cultures of the country, declared their languages to official languages and translate the Constitution into it.
Overall, the Warao, however, is exposed as almost all Amerindian languages , a strong assimilation pressure from the National Society, and its future is therefore difficult to predict.
Regional variants of Waraosprache
Just as there is not " the Warao " as a homogeneous cultural group, so you can not even speak of a uniform Waraosprache. Verbal languages have no written normalization by binding grammars or dictionaries, even if such works exist as a description of certain variants. Here especially the Warao was taken into account, which is spoken in the central Delta. Some science writers simply deny the existence of regional variations, others speak of negligible differences. A reliable test for this purpose does not exist. Most researchers but from at least 4 different main groups of Warao culture and language. The Warao even going to say so far, they could not understand the speakers of certain other Warao groups.
Language structure
Typology of the Warao
It is no longer possible to detect the association of the Warao to a larger language family. One therefore speaks of an " isolated" language ( Weisshar 1982), which is not related to any other living or documented language. However, the Warao has certain structural similarities with other Amerindian languages , similar to the Sprachbund phenomenon, as has been described for the Balkan languages.
After a common classification scheme of linguistics is called the Warao as " agglutinative language ". Languages of this type there are in the world, an example would be Turkish. In agglutinative languages is words ideally be split into individual word parts that hang like the cars of a train together and each transport a lexical or grammatical meaning. Most of the Warao affixes are suffixes, so they are available after the word root, but there are also some prefixes.
Parts of Speech
Contrary to what one it is from the German ago usual, it is difficult to clearly distinguished from one another, the categories of adjectives and nouns and verbs, although most grammar writer to do so by the Warao they use the Latin grammar model ( missionary linguistics), so there's about so-called noun - verbs " noun - verbs ", tribes that function as nouns or verbs, depending on whether they are consistent with a Verbalsuffix or with a Nominalsuffix.
Times, aspects and modalities
The Warao is characterized by a great variety of different times, aspects and modalities which are usually expressed by suffixes on the verb. Also the function that take conjunctions in our language is filled with auxiliary verbs with such extensions. For example, say "as" literally " so - being" ( takore ) on Warao.
Other suffixes
Besides affixes that change the individual words, there is in Warao also those affecting a whole sentence. For example, the suffix- yama, which corresponds to our quotation marks in direct speech and indicates that the speaker knows the facts just hearsay.
Person, number and plurality of the action
In Warao the person of the actor or the object of the action does not need to be expressed on the verb. Although there are independent personal pronouns and some clitic, attached forms, these are not mandatory. For this you can the verb but disputed identify whether an action is performed once or more / was. The plural aspect indicates here that the act was carried out either by a person or repeatedly by several people once. Even with the plural noun does not need to be marked mandatory. The suffix - tuma, which is traded in many works on the Warao as a plural, is actually a so-called " generic plural " and refers to " X and its related things / people ". So about " Waraotuma ": the Warao and yours.
Possession and display items
The construction, which indicates the possession of the Warao, looks like this:
Possession Ender prefix besitzanseigendes Owned: Lora ahoru ( Lora A horu ) thus means literally: " Lora her pot: Loras pot."
A definite or indefinite article, there are not as we are used to from the German. Instead, the personal suffixes that are used in ownership structures, often used it to point out that there is a definite object with an object. The term " older sister " in the middle of text without the owning person would then be translated as " older sister ".
Sentence structure
In the German language one is a freer sentence structure used as in other languages , such as English. Also, the Warao, in its sentence structure great liberties. Not only in terms of the order of clause constituents, but also in terms of the constituents of the sentence that must be unconditional. What the non-native speakers difficult to understand, especially mythological texts, is a valued means of storytelling style for native speakers. Even the scientists do not agree on what is to count as basic word order in Warao. Some give them with SOV ( subject-object - verb ) to ( Osborn 1966b ), others hold OSV ( object-subject - verb) for basic ( Romero - Figeroa 1997). Can hold there anyway that this is the Warao is a language in which the verb is at the end.
As in many, if not most languages of the world, a copula is not necessary in the Warao. Sentences of the type: "the house is great" can be expressed easily with hanoko urida " house big".
As already stated, the subject and object of the verb must be expressed and do not necessarily understand usually out of context, they are even introduced. This omission has stylistic reasons. To avoid misunderstanding, it may nouns that people refer to as " non-subject " of the sentence marked by the suffixes -si/-ma/-to appending depending on the word.