Piraha language
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Piraha (also Piraha, Pirahan) is a language spoken by the Piraha  an indigenous people of Amazonas, Brazil, who live along the Maici river, a tributary of the Amazon.
Piraha is believed to be the only surviving member of the Mura language family, all other members having become extinct in the last few centuries. It is therefore a language isolate, without any known connection to other living languages. Despite having only approximately 150 speakers as of 2004, in eight villages along the Maici, it is not itself in immediate danger of extinction, as language use is vigorous and the Piraha community is monolingual.
The Piraha language has a number of linguistic features that are claimed by some linguists to be unusual, though others have argued that they are found in other languages as well. The most significant source for Information about the grammar of Piraha is Everett (1986) and more than two dozen additional articles by the same author.

# Linguistic features
Noteworthy features of Piraha are alleged to include:
- One of the smallest phoneme inventories of any known language (perhaps surpassed only by Rotokas), and a correspondingly high degree of allophonic variation, including two very rare sounds, Template:IPA and Template:IPA.
- The pronunciation of several phonemes depends on the speaker's sex. Female speakers use seven consonants and three vowels, while male speakers have one more consonant at their disposal.
- An extremely limited clause structure.
- Limitation of numerals to "one" or "two" (though in recent work Everett has claimed that Piraha lacks even these numerals); the closest are general quantity words like "many".
- No abstract color words other than terms for light and dark (though this is disputed in commentaries by Paul Kay and others on Everett (2005)).
- Few specific kin terms; one word covers both "father" and "mother".
- The entire set of personal pronouns appears to have been borrowed from Nheengatu, a Tupi-based lingua franca. Although there is no documentation of a prior stage of Piraha, the close resemblance of the Piraha pronouns to those of Nheengatu makes this hypothesis plausible.
- Piraha can be whistled, hummed, or encoded in music.
However, some of these claims are controversial.

# Phonology
The Piraha language is one of the phonologically simplest languages known, claimed to have as few as ten phonemes (one less than Rotokas). However, this requires analysing  as an underlying /hi/. If this analysis is not accepted, then Piraha women have ten phonemes, but Piraha men have eleven, equal to Rotokas and Hawaiian. (Ian Maddieson has found in researching Piraha data that /k/ indeed has an unusual distribution).
The 'ten phoneme' claim also does not consider the tones of Piraha, at least two of which are phonemic (marked by an acute accent and either unmarked or marked by a grave accent).  Sheldon (1988) claims three tones, high (1), mid (2) and low (3). In Everett's work only two tones are recognized.

## Phoneme inventory
When languages have inventories as small and allophonic variation as great as in Piraha and Rotokas, different linguists may have very different ideas as to the nature of their phonological systems.

### Vowels

### Consonants
The segmental phonemes are:
The number of phonemes is thirteen if Template:IPA is counted as a phoneme and there are just two tones; if Template:IPA is not phonemic, there are twelve phonemes, one more than the number found in Rotokas. (English, by comparison, has about thirty to forty-five, depending on dialect). However, many of these sounds show a great deal of allophonic variation. For instance, vowels are nasalized after the glottal consonants Template:IPA and Template:IPA (written h and x). Also,
- Template:IPA Template:IPA: the nasal Template:IPA after a pause, the trill Template:IPA before Template:IPA.
- Template:IPA Template:IPA: the nasal  after a pause (an apical alveolar nasal); Template:IPA is a lateral alveolar-linguolabial double flap that has only been reported for this language, where the tongue strikes the upper gum ridge and then strikes the lower lip. However, it is only used in certain special types of speech performances, and so might not be considered a normal speech sound.
- Template:IPA Template:IPA: in women's speech, Template:IPA occurs as Template:IPA before Template:IPA, and "sometimes" elsewhere.
- Template:IPA Template:IPA: in men's speech, word-initial Template:IPA and Template:IPA are interchangeable. For many people, Template:IPA and Template:IPA may be exchanged in some words. The sequences Template:IPA and Template:IPA are said to be in free variation with Template:IPA and Template:IPA, at least in some words.
Because of its variation, Everett states that Template:IPA is not a stable phoneme. By analysing it as Template:IPA, he is able to theoretically reduce the number of consonants to seven.
Because of the consonant chart above, Piraha is sometimes said to be one of the few languages without nasals. However, an alternate analysis is possible. By analysing the Template:IPA as Template:IPA and the Template:IPA as Template:IPA, it could also be claimed to be one of the very few languages without velars:

## The bilabial trill
In 2004, linguist D. L. Everett discovered that the language uses a voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate, Template:IPA.  He conjectures that the Piraha had not used that phone in his presence before because they were ridiculed whenever non-Piraha heard the sound. The occurrence of Template:IPA in Piraha is all the more remarkable considering that the only other languages known to use it are the unrelated Chapacura-Wanham languages Oro Win and Wari, spoken some 500 km west of the Piraha area. Oro Win too is a nearly extinct language (surviving only as the second language of a dozen or so members of the Wari tribe) which was discovered by Everett in 1994.

# Lexicon
Piraha has a few loan words, mainly from Portuguese. Piraha "koopo" ("cup") is from the Portuguese word "copo", and "bikagogia" ("business") comes from Portuguese "mercadoria" ("merchandise").

## Kinship terms
The Piraha culture has the simplest known kinship system of any human culture. A single word, baixi (pronounced Template:IPA), is used for both mother and father, and they appear not to keep track of relationships any more distant than biological siblings.

## Numerals
According to Everett (1986), Piraha has words for 'one' and 'two', but more recently he has claimed that Piraha has no words for numerals at all.  There are apparently only three words that roughly describe quantity, somewhat akin to "a few", "some", and "many." There is no grammatical distinction between singular and plural, even in pronouns (see below).

## Color terms
There is also a claim that Piraha lacks any color terminology, being one of the few cultures (mostly in the Amazon basin and New Guinea) that only have specific words for light and dark.  Although the Piraha glossary in D. L. Everett's Ph.D. thesis includes a list of colors words (page 346), Everett (2006) now claims that the items listed in this glossary are not in fact words but descriptive phrases, based on his subsequent additional twenty years of field research.

# Syntax

## Pronouns
The basic Piraha personal pronouns are ti "I", gixai Template:IPA "you (singular)", hi "s/he, they". These can be serially combined: ti gixai or ti hi to mean "we" (inclusive and exclusive), and gixai hi to mean "you (plural)". There are several other pronouns reported, such as 'she', 'it' (animal), 'it' (aquatic animal), and 'it' (inanimate), but these may actually be nouns. The fact that different linguists come up with different lists of such pronouns suggests that they are not basic to the grammar. In two recent papers, Everett cites Sheldon as agreeing with his (Everett's) analysis of the pronouns.
Sheldon (1988) gives the following list of pronouns:
Pronouns are prefixed to the verb, in the order SUBJECT-INDOBJECT-OBJECT where INDOBJECT includes a preposition "to", "for", etc. They may all be omitted. E.g. hi3-ti3-gi1xai3-bi2i3b-i3ha3i1 "he will send you to me".
For possession, a pronoun is used:

## Verbs
Piraha is agglutinative, using a large number of affixes to communicate grammatical meaning. Even the 'to be' verbs of existence or equivalence are suffixes in Piraha. For instance, the Piraha sentence "there is a paca there" uses just two words; the "is" is a suffix on "paca":
Piraha also uses suffixes which communicate evidentiality, a category which English grammar lacks. One such suffix, -xaagaha, means that the speaker actually observed the event in question:
(The suffix -sai turns a verb into a noun, like English '-ing'.)
Other verbal suffixes indicate that an action is deduced from circumstantial evidence, or based on hearsay. Unlike in English, in Piraha a speaker must state their source of information: they cannot be ambiguous. There are also verbal suffixes that indicate desire to perform an action, frustration in completing an action, or frustration in even starting an action.
There are also a large number of verbal aspects: perfective (completed) vs. imperfective (uncompleted), telic (reaching a goal) vs. atelic, continuing, repeated, and commencing. However, despite this complexity, there appears to be little distinction of transitivity. For example, the same verb, xobai, can mean either 'look' or 'see', and xoab can mean either 'die' or 'kill'.
According to Sheldon (1988), the Piraha verb has 8 main suffix slots, and a few sub-slots:
These suffixes undergo some phonetic changes depending on context. For instance, the continuative xii3g reduces to ii3g after a consonant, e.g. in ai3t-a1b-xii3g-a1  ai3ta1bii3ga1 "he is still sleeping".
Also an epenthetic vowel gets inserted between two suffixes if necessary to avoid a consonant cluster; the vowel is either i3 (before or after s, p, or t) or a3 (other cases), e.g. o3ga3i1 so3g-sa3i1   o3ga3i1 so3gi3sa3i1 "he possibly may not want a field".
Conversely, when the junction of two morphemes creates a double vowel (ignoring tones), the vowel with lowest tone is suppressed: si3-ba1-bo3-ga3-a1   si3ba1bo3ga1 "he caused the arrow to wound it".
For further details, see Sheldon's 1988 paper.

## Embedding
In order to embed one clause within another, the embedded clause is turned into a noun with the -sai suffix seen above:
Everett claims that this structure does not really constitute embedding, but is an instance of parataxis, but this has been disputed by other linguists. Everett responds to these criticisms in with the claim that -sai marks  'old information' and does not nominalize.

# Piraha and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
The Piraha do not count with numerals. They use only approximate measures, and in tests were unable to consistently distinguish between a group of four objects and a similarly-arranged group of five objects. When asked to duplicate groups of objects, they duplicate the number correctly on average, but almost never get the number exactly in a single trial.
Being (correctly) concerned that, because of this cultural gap, they were being cheated in trade, the Piraha people asked Daniel Everett, a linguist that was working with them, to teach them basic numeracy skills.  After eight months of enthusiastic but fruitless daily study, the Piraha concluded that they were incapable of learning the material, and discontinued the lessons.  Not a single Piraha had learned to count up to ten or even add 1 + 1.
Everett argues that test subjects are unable to count for two cultural reasons and one formal linguistic reason. First, they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so. Second, they have a cultural constraint against generalizing beyond the present which eliminates number words. Third, since numerals and counting are based on  recursion in the language according to some researchers, then the absence of recursion in their language predicts a lack of counting.  That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary. Everett does not claim that the Pirahas are cognitively incapable of counting.

# Knowledge of other languages
Everett claims that most of the remaining Piraha speakers are monolingual, knowing only a few words of Portuguese. The anthropologist Marco Antonio Goncalves, who lived with the Piraha for 18 months over several years, writes that "Most 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 allowing them to communicate with regional populations, mixing words from Piraha, Portuguese and the Amazonian Lingua Geral known as Nheengatu." In recent work, Jeanette Sakel of the University of Manchester is studying the use of Portuguese by Piraha speakers. Everett's claim is that the Pirahas use a very rudimentary Portuguese lexicon with Piraha grammar when speaking Portuguese, though their Portuguese is so limited to very specific topics that they are rightly called monolingual, without contradicting Goncalves (since they can communicate on a very narrow range of topics using a very restricted lexicon).   Although Goncalves quotes whole stories told by the Piraha, the Portuguese in these stories is not a literal transcription of what was said, but a free translation from the pidgin Portuguese of the Piraha.