Piraha language

Pirahã is the indigenous language of the Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil, who live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon. It is estimated to have between 250 and 380 speakers, yet it is not in immediate danger of extinction, because its use is vigorous and the community is mostly monolingual, knowing at most a restricted Portuguese used for narrow topics. Speakers call their language Apáitisí. Pirahã is the only surviving dialect of the Mura language; the other Mura varieties died out over recent centuries as most Mura groups shifted to Portuguese, so it is now treated as a language in its own right, with suspected relatives such as Matanawi also extinct. The language is noted for one of the smallest phoneme inventories known, at most thirteen phonemes and as few as eleven or fewer by some analyses, together with at least two phonemic tones, and it can be whistled, hummed or encoded in music. It is agglutinative, with verbal suffixes that mark evidentiality, so speakers must state their source of information. Daniel Everett's claims that it lacks recursion and number words, and that its pronouns were borrowed from Nheengatu, have made it a focus of controversy in linguistics, which many scholars contest.