Region Amazon ISO 639-3 myp Pirahã (Mura) | Dialects Pirahã | |
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Ethnicity 1,500 Mura people (1995) Native speakers 360 (2000)mostly monolingual Language family Macro-Warpean ?Mura–MatanawiMura | ||
Mura is a language of Amazonas, Brazil. It is famous for Pirahã, its remaining dialect. Linguistically, it is typified by agglutinativity, a very small number of phonemes (11 compared to over 44 in English), whistled speech, and the use of tone.
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In the 19th century, there were an estimated 30,000–60,000 Mura. It is now spoken by only 300 Pirahã people in eight villages.
Dialects
Since at least Barboza Rodrigues (1892), there have been three ethnic names commonly listed as dialects of Mura, or even as Muran languages. The names are:
On the basis of a minuscule amount of data, it would appear that Bohurá (Mura proper) was mutually intelligible with Pirahã; however, for Yahahí we have only ethnographic information, and can only assume they spoke the same language as other Mura.
The Mura/Bohurá endonym is Buhuraen, according to Barboza Rodrigues (1892), or Buxivaray ~ Buxwarahay, according to Tastevin (1923). This was pronounced Murá by their neighbors, the Torá and Matanawi. In his vocabulary, Rodrigues lists Bohura for the people and bhurai-ada 'Mura language' for the language, from the Mura of the Manicoré River; Tastevin has Bohurai and bohuarai-arase for the same. They also record,
nahi buxwara araha 'That one is Mura'yane abahi araha buxwardi 'We are all Mura'Genealogical relations
Mura is often proposed to be related to Matanawí. Kaufman (1994) also suggests a connection with Huarpe in his Macro-Warpean proposal.