Karo, also known as Ramarama, is a Tupian language of Brazil.
Unusually for the indigenous languages of South America in general and Tupian in particular, Ramarama is a fairly analytic language, with limited affixation and a strict SOV word order. However, the language also displays complex processes of morphophonological alternation, segmental allophony, and interaction between segmental and suprasegmental phonology.
Setting The Arara people speak this language, also formerly known as Arara but had to be changed in the late 1980s so the language could be distinguished from other languages in the Arara branch by similar Brazilian groups. At one point, Ntogapid, Ramarama, Uruku, Urumi and Ytanga were all thought to be sister languages of Karo. After further study, it was determined that they were all the same language that was classified as different languages during various ethnology work in Brazil. The Karo language is spoken in two villages in Brazil; Iterap and Paygap. These villages are located in the Southern region of the Lourdes Stream Indigenous Land in Rondônia, which is in the central west part of Brazil.
Denny Moore's 2006 summary of indigenous language vitality in Brazil documents that there the Arara people have a population of 184, with most of the population speaking the language and a good transmission rate of the language between generations. Although Portuguese is taught as a second language for contact purposes, the native language is still used for many occasions in daily life. Despite the high level of transmission, their low population puts them at risk of extinction.“Karo.” Endangered Language Documentation Programme online, https://www.eldp.net/en/our+projects/projects+list/
History The Arara people did not have contact with outside groups until around the 1940s. Following Euro-Brazilian contact, their culture has suffered tremendously to the point where it has almost disappeared. Some cultural traditions included a corn harvest festival and secluding children until the time they got married. Although their culture has suffered, many traditions such as rites of passages for marriage and naming children have stayed similar. Other traditions have stayed consistent such as their material culture. The Karo people have a deep history of creating many forms of art such as bracelets, baskets, or clay pots. Furthermore, the Karo speakers were known to interact with surrounding peoples in the areas but it was not until the 1940s when they were contacted by the Indian Protection Services (SPI). Settlers brought over new diseases such as pneumonia, measles and the flu which lead to many indigenous people dying in this time period. Luckily, in the 1960s the Arara people regrouped with a nearby people known as the Gavião where they eventually grew in size. By the mid-1980s, the group was able to find their own village and get federal recognition from local groups.
While the Arara people were severely affected by the colonizers who brought many diseases to their people, there is no documentation on conflicts amongst the colonizers. However, there is documentation of conflicts between two groups of Arara. This conflict was between the main group and another group called the “Black Feet” who spoke a different dialect of the language. The groups often got along but there are documentations of conflicts between the two which turned so violent that some lead in death. Moreover, there are no written material on schools for the Karo people. Most people in the village do speak Arara and Portuguese so it is very likely that most of these community members went to schools outside their village.
Documentation The earliest documentation of the Karo language was published by German ethnographer Curt Nimuendaju who produced three wordlists from 1925 to 1955, though he referred to the language as Ntogapíd.Gabas Jr., Genetic relationship within the Ramaráma family of the Tupí stock (Brazil)Nimuendajú, Curt, “As Tribus do Alto Madeira.” Journal de la Société des AméricanistesXVII (1925): 137-172.Nimuendajú, Curt, “Wortlisten aus Amazonien.” Journal de la Société des AméricanistesXXIV (1932): 93-119.Nimuendajú, Curt, “Reconhecimento dos rios Içána, Ayarí, e Uaupés, março a julho de 1927: Apontamentos linguísticos,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes44 (1955): 149-178. Several additional wordlists of Karo, listed under different names, were published during the twentieth century as the Karo people came into greater contact with outside groups. These lists were collected by a variety of people for different aims—a few by anthropologists and ethnographers, one commissioned by a Catholic priest and some by members of the Comissão de Linhas Telegráficas Estratégicas de Mato-Grosso ao Amazonas (Commission of Strategic Telegraphic Wires from Mato-Grosso to Amazonas) who aimed to expand the Western borders of Brazil in the mid-twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, two further wordlists have been published, one by Ruth Fonini Monserrat in the year 2000Monserrat, Ruth Fonini, Vocabulário Amondawa-Português, [etc.], Caixas do Sul: Universidade do Caixas do Sul, 2000. and the other through a 2004 language documentation project by Nilsen Gabas Jr.“Documentation and Description of Karo, Brazil,” Endangered Language Archive at SOAS University of London, http://elar.soas.ac.uk/desposit/0206
The majority of detailed linguistic descriptions completed on the Karo language was done by Gabas Jr. who wrote his master's thesis on the phonology of Karo before going on to specialize in the language. He published a phonological study in 1989 which covered the segmental and syllabic structures found in Karo as well as the morphophonemic, nasality, accentual, and tonal patterns that emerge. The next year in 1999, Gabas Jr. published his dissertation, a preliminary grammar of Karo which briefly covered the phonetics, phonology and morphology of the language before focusing on the syntax with a detailed explanation of Karo's three grammatical systems. He also has several papers on Karo on specific topics such as evidentials and lexical choice in narratives.Gabas, Jr., Nilson. 2001. Evidenciais em Karo. In A.S.A.C. Cabral and Aryon D. Rodrigues (eds.), Línguas indígenas brasileiras. Fonologia, gramática e história. Atas do I Encontro Internacional do GTLI da ANPOLL, I, 254-268. Belém: UFPA.Gabas, Jr., Nilson. 2001. Lexical choice in Karo narratives. Delta 17.
The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) funded a language documentation project coordinated by Gabas Jr. in 2004 for £12,430. Over the course of two years of field work, the project produced a Karo-Portuguese dictionary and amassed 38 videos, 22 audio files and 15 documents displaying a variety of cultural activities including feasts, ceremonies, and collections of common narratives and myths among the Karo people.
Outside of these projects, there has actually been very little to no anthropological data on the Arára people especially around time of contact. The only substantial material published containing a small description of the life of the Arara can be found in anthropological works by French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss.
Classification The Karo language belongs to the Tupí stock of Brazilian Indigenous languages which includes up to 10 language families—Karo in particular is a member of the Ramaráma family. In 1964 Aryon Dall’Igna Rodrigues published a classification of the Tupí stock that placed four languages within the Ramaráma family: Ramaráma, Urukú, Urumí and Karo.Rodrigues, Aryon Dall'Igna, Arnaldo Hauptmann, and Thekla Hartmann, "A CLASSIFICAÇÃO DO TRONCO LINGÜÍSTICO TUPÍ," Revista De Antropologia12, no. 1/2 (1964): 103, However, in 2000, Gabas Jr released a detailed comparative analysis of the wordlists published in those languages that challenged these assumptions and concluded that the only language in the Ramaráma language family is Karo.Gabas Jr., Nilson, "Genetic relationship within the Ramaráma family of the Tupí stock (Brazil)," Indigenous languages of lowland South America(2000): 80-82, http://etnolinguistica.wdfiles.com/local--files/illa:vol1n6/illa_vol1n6_gabas.pdf It has been proposed that Karo and another Tupí language Puruborá are both part of a singular Ramaráma-Puruborá language family, however this is controversial. A joint 2015 computational study comparing common word lists in all Tupí languages found minimal support for that theory.Ana Vilacy Galucio & al., “Genealogical relations and lexical distances within the Tupian linguistic family,” Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas 10, no. 2 (2015): 229-274.
Phonology Syllable structure Unlike many Tupian languages, Ramarama allows consonants in the syllable coda, with no restriction of coda consonants compared to onsets. The permissible structures of a monosyllable are therefore V, CV, VC, and CVC. However, only the glottal stop /ʔ/ can occur as a non-word-final coda consonant. Hence the permissible structures of a polysyllabic word is as follows: ...(C)V(ʔ)(C)V(C). Words of more than three syllables are rare.
Consonants Ramarama has a fairly small consonant inventory, with a wide range of allophonic variation. Notably, the language lacks any fricatives other than /h/, which itself occurs only infrequently.
BilabialAlveolarPalatalVelarGlottalPlosiveVoicelessVoicedNasalFricative/TrillApproximant The tap /r/, though not phonetically a stop, is represented as such because it patterns as the voiced equivalent of the stop /t/. This may indicate a historical rhotacism.
Allophony The voiced stops /b g/ may be lenited to [β ɣ] in the onset of an unstressed syllable and after a vowel: [ˈyaba ~ ˈyaβa] "species of rodent". The palatal stop /c/ may be lenited to [ç] in all circumstances (free variation).
The voiceless stops /p t c k/ are geminated in the onsets of non-initial stressed syllables: [iˈtːɨ] "deer". They are unreleased in the coda of a word-final syllable: [maˈkːap̚] "peanut".
Nasal stops /m n ŋ/ surface as post-stopped nasals [mᵇ nᵈ ŋᶢ] in the onsets of stressed oral syllables: [naʔˈmᵇi] "species of wasp". Conversely, they surface as pre-stopped nasals [ᵇm ᵈn ᶢŋ] in the codas of stressed oral syllables: [kɛᵈn] "to sleep".
The approximants /w j/ are nasalized [w̃ ȷ̃] before nasal vowels. The tap /r/ is nasalized [r̃] only between two nasal vowels, when the first vowel is stressed (as in the process of nasal spreading discussed below).
Vowels Ramarama has a large vowel inventory, with seven oral and four nasal vowels:
FrontCentralBackHigh Mid Low
The mid oral vowels /e o/ alternate with low-mid [ɛ ɔ]: syllables with high pitch surface with [e o], while unstressed syllables or those with mid pitch surface with [ɛ ɔ]. Such interaction between tone and vowel quality is cross-linguistically rare.
Nasal vowels have a restricted distribution. Nilson Gabas Jr. (1999) writes that "there seems to be just one underlying nasal vowel per word", yet transcribes several examples with more than one nasal vowel that nasal spreading cannot account for (e.g. "snake"); this may indicate a nasal spreading rule as yet undescribed, or a freer distribution of nasal vowels than indicated. In any case, nasal vowels also never occur in a penultimate syllable when followed by a voiceless stop in the onset of the final syllable; in other words, sequences of the format /ṼC-VOICEV#/ are disallowed, presumably because such sequences would create a conflict in stress assignment.
Nasal spreading Like many languages with phonemic nasal vowels, Ramarama displays nasal spreading (nasalization of otherwise non-nasal segments due to proximity to a nasal segment) in some circumstances.