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The Arara speak the Karo language, which before was known as Arara, and which came to be called by this author Karo after 1987, so that it could be differentiated from the other Arara languages spoken by groups of the same name in Brazil.

The Karo language belongs to the Ramarama family, of the Tupi linguistic trunk (Rodrigues, 1964), and for a long time it was thought that there were other sister languages belonging to the same family: Ntogapíd (or Itogapúk), Ramarama, Uruku, Urumi and Ytangá.

Recently, however, a work by Gabas (2000) demonstrated that all of these supposed languages are, in fact, one and the same language, which received different names from different ethnologists who gathered word-lists from speakers in different periods (Curt Nimuendaju, in 1925 and 1955; Marechal Rondon, in 1948; Claude Lévi-Strauss, in 1950; Horta Barbosa, in 1945; and Harald Schultz, in 1955). Thus, the Karo language is the only language of the Ramarama family, just as other languages of the Tupi trunk are also the only representatives in their respective families: Aweti, Puruborá and Sateré-Mawé.

Socio-linguistic situation

The Arara Indians live in two distinct villages, Iterap and Paygap. In both, practically all the Indians speak their own language, and Portuguese is learned as a second language and used only as a contact language. Several Arara who were raised by families of colonists only speak the Portuguese language, but they understand perfectly well Karo. The conversations these Indians have with the community and amongst their families are conducted bilingually.

The children of the two villages are taught to speak Karo from the beginning, and although Portuguese may be learnt at a later time, one can already perceive a gradual use of Portuguese terms, mainly by the younger generations, of Portuguese terms, generally for relations of kinship(father, mother, uncle, aunt, cousin m./f.).

Several Arara also speak or understand the Gavião language, spoken by the neighboring Gavião Indians, thanks to situations of marriage among members of the two ethnic groups. The multilingualism is these cases is not looked on in a negative way, despite the fact the Arara and the Gavião are traditional enemies.

Interesting aspects of the language

The Karo language has several aspects which are of interest to scholars of non-European languages, among which I shall mention three:

The first is the occurrence of a system of classifiers, through which a classifier can occur with a substantive referring (basically) to the form in which this substantive occurs in the world (real or imaginary). A practical example is the word for “eye” that in Karo is icagá 'a', in which the first word means “eye” and the second means “round object”. The system of classifiers in Karo has ten different items, referring to different aspects of objects.

Another interesting aspect of the language is the occurrence of a system of ideophones, words generally with a very specific verb meaning and which are used to give more “expression” to stories and conversations. An example of an ideophone in Karo is the word oturum, which means “to go down to the ground making a very loud noise”, or ngârâgn, which means “turn your head around”. Ideophones in Karo are an open class, that is, they can be formed from the imagination and creativity of the speaker, hence there is a very large number of them.

A third interesting aspect in Karo is the existence of a system of evidential words, which serve to identify the source or trustworthiness of the information told by the speakers of the language. For example, if an Arara pronounced the word to'wa after a phrase, he means that what is being narrated derives from word-of-mouth, that is, he was not testimony to, nor is he supposing the fact, he is only retransmitting the information. The language uses ten different types of evidential words.