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, Andoa and Conambo.
Current situation
The dominant languages of the area are Kichwa and Spanish, and they are both widely spoken by Arabelas. Kichwa has been the default language for native communities in the area since the rubber boom era, and has spread through trade mixed marriages. It is, however, losing ground to Spanish in the younger generations. The use of Arabela is restricted to a small elderly fraction of the population. The language is official per the Constitution of Peru, but this did not stop its decline. There is no written literature in Arabela, but the language has been used in education by the Peruvian government, which has issued some school material in it. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been translated into Arabela in 1988.
Dialectal divisions
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'.
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 the one of the other zaparoan languages and distinguishes between active and passive personal pronouns. Active pronouns act as subjects in independent clause and as objects in dependent ones.
Personal pronouns
Anaphoric pronouns
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.
