View source for Guna language

{{Short description|Chibchan language spoken in Panama and Colombia}}
{{Infobox language
| name             = Guna
| nativename       = {{lang|mul|Dulegaya}}
| states           = [[Panama]], [[Colombia]]
| region           = [[San Blas Islands]], [[Panama]]; north coastal region, [[Colombia]]
| ethnicity        = [[Guna people]]
| speakers         = {{sigfig|60,600|2}}
| date             = 2000
| ref              = e24
| familycolor      = American
| fam1             = [[Chibchan languages|Chibchan]]
| fam2             = Guna–Colombian
| lc1              = cuk
| lc2              = kvn
| ld1              = San Blas Kuna
| ld2              = Border Kuna
| glotto           = kuna1280
| glottorefname    = Kuna
| map              = Guna - Dulegaya.png
| altname          = Kuna
}}
[[File:KunaWomanSellingMolas.jpg|thumb|Kuna woman selling [[Mola (art form)|Mola]]s]]

The '''Guna language''' (formerly '''Kuna''' or '''Cuna'''), spoken by the [[Guna people]] of [[Panama]] and [[Colombia]], belongs to the [[Chibchan languages|Chibchan language family]].

==History==
The Guna were living in what is now Northern Colombia and the [[Darién Province]] of Panama at the time of the Spanish invasion, and only later began to move westward towards what is now [[Guna Yala]] due to a conflict with Spanish and other Indigenous groups.  Centuries before the conquest, the Guna arrived in [[South America]] as part of a [[Chibchan]] migration moving east from [[Central America]].  At the time of the Spanish invasion, they were living in the region of Uraba and near the borders of what are now [[Antioquia Department|Antioquia]] and [[Caldas Department|Caldas]]. [[Alonso de Ojeda]] and [[Vasco Núñez de Balboa]] explored the coast of Colombia in 1500 and 1501.  They spent the most time in the [[Gulf of Urabá]], where they made contact with the Guna.

In far-eastern Guna Yala, the community of New Caledonia is near the site where [[Scotland|Scottish]] explorers tried, unsuccessfully, to establish a [[Darien scheme|colony in the "New World"]]. The bankruptcy of the expedition has been cited as one of the motivations of the [[Acts of Union 1707|1707 Acts of Union]].

There is a wide consensus regarding the migrations of Guna from Colombia and the Darien towards what is now Guna Yala.  These migrations were caused partly by wars with the [[Emberá people|Catio people]], but some sources contend that they were mostly due to bad treatment by the Spanish invaders. The Guna themselves attribute their migration to Guna Yala to conflicts with the native peoples, and their migration to the islands to the excessive mosquito populations on the mainland.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the Panamanian government attempted to suppress many of the traditional customs. This was bitterly resisted, culminating in a short-lived yet successful revolt in 1925 known as the [[Tule Revolution]] (or people revolution), led by [[Nele Kantule|Iguaibilikinyah Nele Gantule]] of [[Ustupo|Ustupu]] and supported by American adventurer and part-time diplomat [[Richard Marsh (diplomat)|Richard Marsh]]<ref name=howe/> – and a treaty in which the Panamanians agreed to give the Guna some degree of cultural autonomy.<ref name=howe>James Howe. ''A PEOPLE WHO WOULD NOT KNEEL: Panama, the United States, and the San Blas Kuna'' (Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry). Smithsonian, 1998. {{ISBN|978-1-56098-865-6}}</ref>

==Phonemes==
{{Unreferenced section|date=March 2025}}
The Guna language recognizes 5 [[vowel]] [[phoneme]]s and 17 [[consonant]]al phonemes.

===Vowels===
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center"
!
! [[Front vowel|Front]]
! [[Central vowel|Central]]
! [[Back vowel|Back]]
|-
! [[High vowel|High]]
| {{IPAlink|i}}
|
| {{IPAlink|u}}
|-
! [[Mid vowel|Mid]]
| {{IPAlink|e}}
|
| {{IPAlink|o}}
|-
! [[Low vowel|Low]]
|
| {{IPAlink|a}}
|
|}

Vowels may be short or long.

===Consonants===
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center"
|-
! colspan="2" | 
! [[Labial consonant|Labial]]
! [[Alveolar consonant|Alveolar]]
! [[Palatal consonant|Palatal]]
! [[Velar consonant|Velar]]
|-
! rowspan="2" | [[Plosive]]
! <small>Lax</small>
| {{IPAlink|p}} {{angbr|b}}
| {{IPAlink|t}} {{angbr|d}}
| 
| {{IPAlink|k}} {{angbr|g}}
|-
! <small>Tense</small>
| {{IPAlink|pː}} {{angbr|bb}}
| {{IPAlink|tː}} {{angbr|dd}}
| 
| {{IPAlink|kː}} {{angbr|gg}}
|-
! rowspan="2" | [[Nasal consonant|Nasal]]
! <small>Lax</small>
| {{IPAlink|m}} {{angbr|m}}
| {{IPAlink|n}} {{angbr|n}}
| 
| 
|-
! <small>Tense</small>
| {{IPAlink|mː}} {{angbr|mm}}
| {{IPAlink|nː}} {{angbr|nn}}
| 
| 
|-
! colspan="2" | [[Affricate]]
| 
| 
| {{IPAlink|tʃ}} {{angbr|ds, ss}}
| 
|-
! colspan="2" | [[Fricative]]
| 
| {{IPAlink|s}} {{angbr|s}}
| 
| 
|-
! rowspan="2" | [[Lateral consonant|Lateral]]
! <small>Lax</small>
| 
| {{IPAlink|l}} {{angbr|l}}
| 
| 
|-
! <small>Tense</small>
| 
| {{IPAlink|lˑ}} {{angbr|ll}}
| 
| 
|-
! colspan="2" | [[Rhotic consonant|Rhotic]]
| 
| {{IPAlink|ɾ}} {{angbr|r}}
| 
| 
|-
! colspan="2" | [[Approximants]]
| {{IPAlink|w}} {{angbr|w}}
| 
| {{IPAlink|j}} {{angbr|y}}
| 
|}

Most consonants may appear either as short (lax) or long (tense).  The long consonants only appear in intervocalic position. However, they are not always a result of morpheme concatenation, and they often differ phonetically from the short analogue.  For example, the long stop consonants p, t, and k are pronounced as voiceless, usually with longer duration than in English.  The short counterparts are pronounced as voiced b, d, and g when they are between vowels or beside [[sonorant]] consonants m, n, l, r, y, or w (they are written using b, d, and g in the Kuna alphabet).  At the beginnings of words, the stops may be pronounced either as voiced or voiceless; and are usually pronounced as voiceless word-finally  (Long consonants do not appear word-initially or word-finally).  In an even more extreme case, the long s is pronounced [tʃ].  Underlying long consonants become short before another consonant. The letter ''w'' may be pronounced as either [v] or [w] depending on dialect and position.

=== Other phonological rules ===
The alveolar /s/ becomes the postalveolar [ʃ] after /n/ or /t/.
Both long and short /k/ become [j] before another consonant.

== Orthography ==
{{Expand section|date=February 2025}}
In 2010, the Guna General Congress decided a spelling reform by which long consonants should be written with double letters. Equally, the phonemes /p, t, k/ that may sound like [p, t, k] or [b, d, g] are represented by {{angbr|b, d, g}} in all positions. Equally, the old digraph {{angbr|ch}} becomes {{angbr|ss}} or {{angbr|ds}} depending on its morphological precedence (narassole [naraʧole] < naras + sole, godsa [koʧa] 'called' < godde 'to call' + -sa (past). So, the reformed orthography uses only the fifteen letters {{angbr|b, d, g, l, m, n, r, s, w, y; a, e, i, o, u}} for transcribing all the sounds of the language, with the digraphs {{angbr|bb, dd, gg, ll, mm, nn, ss}} for the tense consonants.<ref>{{cite web |title=Archived copy |url=http://www.congresogeneralkuna.com/ISGAR.Dic.%20010.pdf |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120206093117/http://www.congresogeneralkuna.com/ISGAR.Dic.%20010.pdf |archive-date=6 February 2012 |access-date=13 January 2022 |website=www.congresogeneralkuna.com}}</ref>

== Morphology ==
Guna is an [[agglutinative language]] which contains words of up to about 9 morphemes, although words of two or three morphemes are more common. Most of the morphological complexity is found in the verb, which contains suffixes of tense and aspect, plurals, negatives, position (sitting, standing, etc.) and various adverbials. The verb is not marked for person.

==References==
{{reflist}}

== Further reading ==
*Llerena Villalobos, Rito. (1987). ''Relación y determinación en el predicado de la lengua Kuna''. Bogotá: CCELA – Universidad de los Andes. ISSN 0120-9507 {{in lang|es}}
*{{cite book|author=Alphonse Louis Pinart|title=Vocabulario castellano-cuna|url=https://archive.org/details/vocabulariocast00pinagoog|access-date=25 August 2012|year=1890|publisher=Ernest Leroux|pages=[https://archive.org/details/vocabulariocast00pinagoog/page/n10 3]–}}
*{{cite book | title=Ethno-linguistic Cuna dictionary, with indices and references to A critical and comparative Cuna grammar (Etnologiska studier 14) and The grammatical sketch in Cuna chrestomathy (Etnologiska studier 18) | publisher=Etnografiska Museet | author=Holmer, Nils Magnus | year=1952 | location=Göteborg}}
*de Gerdes, Marta Lucía. (2003). "'The life story of grandmother Elida': Kuna personal narratives as verbal art." In Translating native Latin American verbal art: Ethnopoetics and ethnography of speaking. Kay Sammons and Joel Sherzer, eds. Washington, D.C
*Wikaliler Daniel Smith. 2014. ''[https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/25999 A Grammar of Guna: A Community-Centered Approach]''. University of Texas at Austin.

==External links==
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20140103131242/http://paigepenland.com/wp-content/uploads/kuna-dictionary.pdf Kuna phrasebook]
*[http://www.famsi.org/research/mltdp/item205/ms_coll_700_item205_wk1_body0001.html Vocabulario Castellano-Cuna: Compuesto por el Señor Don Alfonso L. Pinart]
*[http://www.ailla.utexas.org/search/view_resource.html?lg_id=6 Kuna language], Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America
*[http://www.language-archives.org/language/cuk OLAC resources in and about the San Blas Kuna language]
*ELAR archive of [http://elar.soas.ac.uk/deposit/0251 Documentation and Description of Kuna]
*[http://www.ailla.utexas.org/search/collection.html?c_id=14 Kuna Collection of Marta Lucía de Gerdes], including recordings and translations of a narrative and a chant, from the [[Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America]].
*[http://www.ailla.utexas.org/search/collection.html?c_id=144 Gammibe Gun Galu], an archive of recordings of a Kuna musical group, from the [[Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America]].

{{Languages of Colombia}}
{{Languages of Panama}}
{{Chibchan languages}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Guna Language}}
[[Category:Chibchan languages]]
[[Category:Languages of Panama]]
[[Category:Languages of Colombia]]
[[Category:Indigenous languages of the Caribbean]]