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Tariana (also Tariano) is an endangered Maipurean (also known as Arawak) language spoken along the Vaupés River in Amazonas, Brazil by approximately 100 people. Another approximately 1,500 people in the upper and middle Vaupés River area identify themselves as ethnic Tariana but do not speak the language fluently.^[2]

The Indigenous people of the Vaupés region, including the Tariana and East Tucano peoples, are linguistically exogamous; they consider fellow speakers of their languages blood relatives. In this region, languages—like tribal identity—are passed down through patrilineal descent, and as such are kept strictly separate from one another, with minimal lexical borrowing occurring among them. The Indigenous people of this region traditionally spoke between three and ten other languages, including their mother's and father's tongues—which were usually different due to the widespread cultural practice of linguistic exogamy—and Spanish and/or Portuguese.

Speakers of Tariana have been switching to the unrelated Tucano language (of the Tucanoan family), which became a lingua franca in the Vaupés region in the late 19th century. Arriving in the region in the 1920s, Salesian missionaries promoted the exclusive use of Tucano among Indians in an effort to convert them. Economic concerns have also led fathers to increasingly leave their families to work for non-Amerindian Brazilians, which has undermined the patrilineal father-child interaction through which Tariana was traditionally acquired. In 1999, efforts were made to teach Tariana as a second language in the secondary school in Iauaretê. Regular classes in Tariana have been offered at the school since 2003.^[3]: 6–9

Research on Tariana, including a grammar book and a Tariana-Portuguese dictionary, has been done by Alexandra Aikhenvald from the La Trobe University, a specialist on the Arawak language family.^[4]

Phonology

Tariana has a relatively large phoneme inventory, compared to other Vaupés languages such as Baniwa and Tucano. It has a rare set of phonotactic restrictions that determine whether phonemes can occur initially or medially and in which types of morphemes. The phoneme , for example, can occur initially in roots but not in affixes or enclitics.

Bolded letters indicate the orthography used by Alexandra Aikhenvald in her Grammar of Tariana. IPA transcription is indicated if it differs from the standard orthography.

Vowels

Tariana has 6 vowels, all of which may occur nasalized, except for , or long, except for and .

Consonants

Tariana has 24 consonants:

A tendency to insert a glottal stop /ʔ/ after word-final /a/ has been noted among younger speakers. That has been ascribed to the influence of Tucano.