Tariana, an Arawak Language from North-West Amazonia

Tariana, the only Arawak language spoken in the Vaupés River Basin linguistic area, has developed numerous polysynthetic patterns, as a result of areal diffusion neighbouring East Tucanoan languages. Tariana is spoken in a situation of obligatory societal multilingualism, based on linguistic exogamy. Special features of Tariana shared with other polysynthetic languages include variable order of morphemes, ‘recursive affixing’ (similar to Eskimo-Aleut languages), templatic structures of nouns and verbs, and multiple serial verb constructions which behave as single word structures with respect to derivational processes. Most of these patterns are absent from Baniwa and other closely related Arawak languages, and also from one of the two extant dialects of Tariana under strong influence from Baniwa.