Muniche (2023) (original) (raw)

This chapter provides an overview of the grammar and phonology of Muniche, an almost-extinct linguistic isolate historically spoken in the Huallaga River basin of central Peruvian Amazonia. Reflecting its location in the transitional zone between the Andean highlands and the Amazonian lowlands, Muniche exhibits a combination of typically Andean and typically Amazonian features. Muniche has an unusually large consonant inventory for an Amazonian language, with clear signs of convergence towards an Andean consonantal profile, and complex consonant clusters that are likewise atypical of Amazonian languages. It is a head-marking VSO language, with morphologically complex verbs that can bear causative, passive, and reciprocal derivational suffixes, as well as desiderative, irrealis, sentential mood, tense, and aspect suffixes. Subject and object person markers are enclitics, with subject markers exhibiting the unusual property of being second-position clausal enclitics. Muniche nouns are morphologically simpler than verbs, not bearing case suffixes but exhibiting noun classifiers similar to those found in many Amazonian languages. This chapter appears in Vol 2 of Amazonian Languages: Isolates, An International Handbook. The version available here is the authors' final version. The published version is available here: https://www.degruyter.com/serial/hskal-b/html