Kuna language

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Dulegaya (Kuna Language)

The Kuna Language, spoken by the Kuna people of Panama and Colombia, belongs to the Chibchan linguistic family.

Phonemes

Kuna recognises 5 vowel phonemes and 17 consonantal phonemes.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e
Low		a

Consonants

	labial	alveolar	alveolar	palatal	velar
Lax stops	p	t			k
Tense stops	pˑ	tˑ			kˑ
Lax nasals	m	n
Tense nasals	mˑ	nˑ
Affricates				tʃ
Fricatives		s
Lax lateral			l
Tense lateral			lˑ
Rhotic			r
Approximant	w			j

The oclusive consonants p, t, and k become the sonorants b, d, and g when they are between vowels or beside the consonants m, n, l, r, y, or w, just as at the beginning of the word, when the pronunciation fluctuates liberally. The alveolars s through n become the palatals ʃ and ʎ like l after k.

[edit] Morphology

Kuna is an agglutinative language which contains words of up to about 9 morphemes, although words of two or three morphemes are more common. Most of the morphological complexity is found in the verb word, which contains suffixes of tense and aspect, plurals, negatives, position (sitting, standing, etc.), and various adverbials. The verb word does not contain person.

[edit] References

• Llerena Villalobos, Rito (1987) Relación y determinación en el predicado de la lengua Kuna. Bogotá: CCELA - Universidad de los Andes. ISSN 0120-9507 (Spanish)