Mura Language
Mura is a language of Amazonas, Brazil. It is famous for Pirahã, its remaining dialect. Linguistically, it is typified by agglutinativity, a very small number of phonemes (11 compared to over 40 in English), whistled speech, and the use of tone.
In the 19th century, there were an estimated 30,000–60,000 Mura. It is now spoken by only 300 Pirahã people in eight villages.
Read more about Mura Language: Dialects, Genealogical Relations
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)