Jodï-Sáliban: A Linguistic Family of the Northwest Amazon

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Rosés Labrada, Jorge Emilio

• The Jodï are a small indigenous group of approximately 1,000 people living in relative isolation in the Venezuelan Sierra de Maigualida. Their language has generally been treated as an isolate or left unclassified in the language classification literature. However, different researchers have proposed that Jodï is related to the Cariban, Yanomaman, Sáliban, or “Makú” language families. In this article, I investigate in depth the proposed Jodï-Sáliban relationship by means of comparison of lexical and grammatical material. Based on numerous regular sound correspondences as well as grammatical correspondences—some of which are too idiosyncratic to be nothing but the product of inheritance—I conclude that Jodï is related to the Sáliban languages.

• Date created

  2019-07-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Mako
  • internal classification
  • Jodï
  • Sáliba
  • Piaroa
  • genetic classification
  • historical linguistics
  • Jodï-Sáliban

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-5ck6-7m10

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International