Like all native languages in Peru, it has an official status in areas where it is spoken.[2]
The language and its speakers
Arabela is a language of the Zaparoan family of languages. Zaparoan tongues were once widely spoken in the rain forest of north-eastern Peru, but Zaparoan-speaking people have been decimated by diseases, wars with neighboring native groups, and by quasi-enslavement during the rubber boom. Most Zaparoan communities have shifted to Lamas Quechua or Spanish, while others have been incorporated into Shuar groups. The few surviving Zaparoan languages are all severely endangered. Among those, Arabela is most closely related to Zaparo (the only one still spoken), Andoa and Conambo.
There is no dialectal division among known Arabela speakers. A small group, called Pananuyuri, separated from other Arabelas roughly a century ago. Their fate is unknown but they may have survived, in which case their dialect is likely to have somewhat diverged from the other speakers'.[citation needed]
Phonology
The Arabela phonemic inventory is quite typical for a Zaparoan language. It has five places of articulation and a vowel inventory of five vowels common within the family.
Arabela has no grammatical gender but for a few words, mostly describing persons, the sex can be specified by adding a suffix:
Cua niya-nu: 'my son'
Cua niya-tu: 'my daughter'
Arabela has two grammatical numbers, singular and plural. The plural is generally added by adding a suffix to the singular, the nature of this suffix varying according to the pluralized word.
In a few cases, however, the plural can be formed through suffix substitution, or by using a different root altogether.
caya: 'man' yields 'canuu'
maanu: 'group' yields 'maapue'
nucua: 'mother' yields 'nuhuocuaca'
A number of other words form their plural by removing a singular specific suffix:
saijia: 'stone' yields sai 'stone'
Pronouns
Arabela has a complex pronominal system, similar to those of other Zaparoan languages and distinguishes between active and passive personal pronouns. Active pronouns act as subjects in independent clauses and as objects in dependent ones.
The verbal ending -no is used as an anaphoric. It can also mark the subject of a subordinate sentence when it refers to the object of the main sentence.
12"CONSTITUCION POLÍTICA DEL PERÚ 1993". February 17, 2006. Archived from the original on 21 February 2009. Retrieved 2009-03-02. Artículo 48º
Son idiomas oficiales el castellano y, en las zonas donde predominen, también lo son el quechua, el aimara y las demás lenguas aborígenes, según la ley.
