Pirahã phonology

The Pirahã language is one of the phonologically simplest languages known, comparable to Rotokas (New Guinea) and Hawaiian. There is a claim that Pirahã has as few as ten phonemes, one fewer than Rotokas, but this requires analyzing as an underlying. Although such a phenomenon is odd cross-linguistically, Ian Maddieson has found in researching Pirahã data that does indeed exhibit an unusual distribution in the language.

The 'ten phoneme' claim also does not consider the tones of Pirahã, at least two of which are phonemic (marked by an acute accent and either unmarked or marked by a grave accent in Everett), bringing the number of phonemes to at least twelve. Sheldon (1988) claims three tones, high (¹), mid (²) and low (³).

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

Consonants
The segmental phonemes are:

is written $\langlex\rangle$.

has been claimed to be an allophone of the sequence. Women sometimes substitute for.

The number of phonemes is thirteen, matching Hawaiian, if is counted as a phoneme and there are just two tones; if  is not phonemic, there are twelve phonemes, one more than the number found in Rotokas. (English, by comparison, has 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 and  (written h and x). Also,


 * : the nasal after a pause, the trill  before.


 * : the nasal (an apical alveolar nasal) after a pause;  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.


 * : in women's speech, occurs as  before, and "sometimes" elsewhere.


 * : in men's speech, word-initial and  are interchangeable. For many people,  and  may be exchanged in some words. The sequences  and  are said to be in free variation with  and, at least in some words.

Because of its variation, Everett states that is not a stable phoneme. By analyzing it as, he is able to theoretically reduce the number of consonants to seven.

Pirahã is sometimes said to be one of the few languages without nasals, with the voiced stops analyzed as underlyingly and :

However, an alternative analysis is possible. By analysing the voiced stops as underlyingly and, and the  as , it could also be claimed to be one of the very few languages without velars:

The bilabially trilled affricate
In 2004, Everett discovered that the language uses a voiceless bilabially post-trilled dental stop,. He conjectures that the Pirahã had not used that phone in his presence before because they were ridiculed whenever non-Pirahã heard the sound. The occurrence of in Pirahã 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 Pirahã 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.