ISO 639:huu
| Murui Huitoto | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Colombia, Peru |
|
Native speakers
|
7,800 (1995–2002) |
|
Bora–Witoto
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | muru1274 |
Murui Huitoto - (or simply Murui also known as Bue, Witoto Murui or Witoto) is an indigenous American Huitoto language of the Witotoan family. Murui is spoken by about 1,100 Murui people along the banks of the Putumayo, Cara-Paraná and Igara-Paraná rivers in Colombia. In Peru it spoken in the North alongside the Ampiyacu and Napo rivers by some 1,000 people. Some Murui speakers live also outside their territories, for instance the vicinity of Leticia, Amazonas, Colombia.
Approximately 1,000 Peruvians use Murui in both its written and oral forms. The language is accorded official status and is used in schools. It is also used in churches. There are no Murui-an monolinguals in Peru: speakers of the language who do not also use another language. The language has 1,900 speakers in southwestern Colombia where it has higher social utility and standing. It was formerly spoken in Brazil, but is now extinct in that country.
Murui uses the Roman Script. There is a dictionary of the Murui language (Murui-Spanish and Spanish-Murui) compiled by an SIL linguist, Shirley Burtch (1983), and number of works concerning its grammar (Petersen de Piñeros 1994, Petersen de Piñeros & Patiño: 2000, Wojtylak 2012).
Currently, a PhD student at James Cook University, Katarzyna Wojtylak is working on a comprehensive grammar of Murui to be published in 2017.
Murui has a relatively small inventory of 16 contrastive consonantal phonemes some of which have restricted phonotactics. Murui consonant inventory is similar to two other dialects of Witoto, Mɨka and Mɨnɨka.The vowel inventory of the language is based on a six vowel system that consist of, among other sounds, the high central vowel ɨ. This trait is typical for languages from Northwest Amazonia, such as Tucanoan and Carib languages (Aikhenvald, 2012).
The orthographic representation is to the left; the IPA to the right (note that before i and e, c is written qu).
Murui is highly synthetic, predominantly suffixing and nominative-accusative. The language is predominantly verb-final; the organization of the constituents in the clause is usually SV/AOV. Grammatical relations are expressed through pronouns cross-referencing on the verb (with one cross-referencing position: the subject S/A). Syntactic functions can be expressed through case markers. Marking of core arguments (S, A, O = non S/A focus) is generally optional and is related to focus; marking of peripheral arguments on an NP (i.e. locative, ablative, commitative-instrumental, benefactive, privative) is usually mandatory.
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