About the Pirahã

The Pirahã language has traditionally been referred to as the Mura- Pirahã (Everett 1986). This designation obscures the distinction between the Mura language family and the Mura and Pirahã languages. The Mura family has no known external affiliates and it includes Pirahã and three dead languages: Matanavi, Bohura and Yahahi (Everett 1986).

There are between 9-15 different Pirahã villages along the Maici River. In the dry season, when the river is low and there are beaches, the village locations will increase considerably because they break up into small groups. The Membership of each village is between 15-40 People, with the larger numbers during the rain season and the smaller numbers during the dry season.

A village is comprised of two to three families. A family is a father, mother, plus the children. A child may or may not stay living with his parents after the age of 3. Most (of) the larger villages have a subculture of children, generally ages 3-14, who live together and take care of each other. These children, in general, come from broken homes, that is, their parents have split up and remarried.

Just as there is a geographic tightness in the lay-out of the lean-tos of a village, so there is a strong, tightly knit social networking between the members. All members know everything about any given member of the group and each are considered to be close brothers and sisters. The close proximity of houses and the fact that there are no walls, makes each members life an open book. Nothing is hid from the other. The concept of a private life is foreign.

The Pirahã language challenges simplistic application of Hockett's (1960) nearly universally-accepted 'design features of human language', by showing that some of these design features (interchangeability, displacement, and productivity) may be culturally constrained. In particular Pirahã culture constrains communication to non-abstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of interlocutors.

This constraint explains several very surprising features of Pirahã grammar and culture:

(i) the absence of creation myths and fiction;

(ii) the simplest kinship system yet documented;

(iii) the absence of numbers of any kind or a concept of counting;

(iv) the absence of color terms;

(v) the absence of embedding in the grammar;

(vi) the absence of 'relative tenses';

(vii) the borrowing of its entire pronoun inventory from Tupi;

(vi) the fact that the Pirahã are monolingual after more than 200 years of regular contact with Brazilians and the Tupi-Guarani-speaking Kawahiva;

(vii) the absence of any individual or collective memory of more than two generations past;

(viii) the absence of drawing or other art and one of the simplest material cultures yet documented;

(ix) the absence of any terms for quantification, e.g. 'all', 'each', 'every', 'most', 'some', etc.

For more information, see Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã (reproduced here with the permission of the author)..