Kuna language

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

Phonemes

Kuna recognises has 5 vowel phonemes and 17 consonantal phonemes.

Vowels

Vowels may be short or long.

Consonants

Most consonants may appear either as short (lax) or long (tense). The long consonants only appear intervocalically/ However, they are not always a result of morpheme concatenation, and they often differ phonetically from the short analogue. For example, the long stop consonants p, t, and k are pronounced as voiceless, usually with longer duration than in English. The short counterparts are pronounced as voiced b, d, and g when they are between vowels or beside sonorant consonants m, n, l, r, y, or w (they are written using b, d, and g in the Kuna alphabet). At the beginnings of words, the stops may be pronounced either as voiced or voiceless; and are usually pronounced as voiceless word-finally (Long consonants do not appear word-initially or word-finally). In an even more extreme case, the long s is pronounced [tʃ]. Underlyingly long consonants become short before another consonant.

Other phonological rules

The alveolar s becomes the palatal ʃ after n or t. Both long and short [k] become [j] before another consonant.

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, which contains suffixes of tense and aspect, plurals, negatives, position (sitting, standing, etc.) and various adverbials. The verb is not marked for person.

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)

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