This Piraha Tribe of Brazil was initially a sub group of the Mura Tribe who lived deeper in the forest. They separated from the Mura Tribe in the early 1700's and have long since chosen isolation. The Piraha tribe opts not to embrace the benefits of modern civilization, instead choosing to engage in trade with neighboring communities, which, in turn, craft boats for them. The sole adjustment they have embraced involves donning garments crafted by themselves. The Pirahã are supremely gifted in all the ways necessary to ensure their continued survival in the jungle: they know the usefulness and location of all important plants in their area; they understand the behavior of local animals and how to catch and avoid them; and they can walk into the jungle naked, with no tools or weapons, and walk out three days later with baskets of fruit, nuts, and small game.

The Pirahã call themselves hiaitsiihi, a category of human beings or bodies (ibiisi) that differentiates them from Whites and other Indians. They possess an elaborate naming system intimately connected with their cosmology. Even before birth, while still in the maternal womb, they receive their first name: this name is believed to be responsible for the creation of their bodies. During life, they receive further names from beings dwelling in higher and lower layers of the cosmos, responsible for the creation of their souls and destinies, as well as names from war enemies. The Pirahã are direct descendents of the Mura. Their language, material culture, social organization and physical similarity leave no doubt concerning their past links with this people. Nimuendajú (1982a/1925) was the first to make the association between the two groups, subsequently referring to the Pirahã as Mura-Pirahã. From this point on, the history of the two groups has been irrevocably bound together, making it usual to think of the Pirahã as the latter-day survivors of the ancient ‘Mura Nation,’ once inhabiting the margins of the Madeira river.

The Pirahã are an indigenous people, numbering around 700, living along the banks of the Maici River in the jungle of northwest Brazil. Their language, also called Pirahã, is so unusual in so many ways that it was profiled in 2007 in a 12,000-word piece in the New Yorker by John Colapinto, who wrote:

Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations.

Among Pirahã’s many peculiarities is an almost complete lack of numeracy, an extremely rare linguistic trait of which there are only a few documented cases. The language contains no words at all for discrete numbers and only three that approximate some notion of quantity—hói, a “small size or amount,” hoí, a “somewhat larger size or amount,” and baágiso, which can mean either to “cause to come together” or “a bunch.”

The Pirahã are an indigenous tribe from the Amazonas region of Brazil. There are thought to be about 400 individuals left living mainly along the Maici River in the Amazon Rainforest. The Pirahã descend from a larger indigenous group called the Mura, but split from the main tribe long before the Mura were first contacted in 1714. The Mura learned Portuguese and their language is now extinct, but the Pirahã retreated into the jungle and still appear relatively uninterested in adopting outside influences. In 1921, the anthropologist Curt Nimuendajú noted that they showed “little interest in the advantages of civilisation” and displayed “almost no signs of permanent contact with civilised people.” Little has changed today. Pirahã people build simple huts where they keep a few pots, pans, knives, and machetes. They make only scraping implements (for making arrowheads), loosely woven palm-leaf bags, bows, and arrows. They rely on neighbouring communities' to build canoes for them and trade Brazil nuts for consumables or tools, e.g. machetes, gunpowder, powdered milk, sugar, whiskey. One adoption of western living they have taken on is clothing. Traditional necklaces are still worn but so are T-shirts and shorts for men and home sewn cotton dresses for women.

Pirahã (also spelled Pirahá, Pirahán), or Múra-Pirahã, is the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. The Pirahã live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon River. Pirahã is the only surviving dialect of the Mura language; all others having died out in the last few centuries as most groups of the Mura people have shifted to Portuguese. Suspected relatives, such as Matanawi, are also extinct. Pirahã is estimated to have between 250 and 380 speakers. It is not in immediate danger of extinction, as its use is vigorous and the Pirahã community is mostly monolingual. The Pirahã language is most notable as the subject of various controversial claims; for example, that it provides evidence against linguistic relativity. The controversy is compounded by the sheer difficulty of learning the language; the number of linguists with field experience in Pirahã is very small.

Based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations. It is a language so confounding to non-natives that until Everett and his wife, Keren, arrived among the Pirahã, as Christian missionaries, in the nineteen-seventies, no outsider had succeeded in mastering it. Everett eventually abandoned Christianity, but he and Keren have spent the past thirty years, on and off, living with the tribe, and in that time they have learned Pirahã as no other Westerners have. “Xaói hi gáísai xigíaihiabisaoaxái ti xabiíhai hiatíihi xigío hoíhi,” Everett said in the tongue’s choppy staccato, introducing me as someone who would be “staying for a short time” in the village. The men and women answered in an echoing chorus, “Xaói hi goó kaisigíaihí xapagáiso.”

Pirahã problems with reading, writing, and arithmetic stemmed not from slow-wittedness but from a cultural conviction about how to converse. From the villagers’ perspective, talking should concern only knowledge based on one’s personal, immediate experience. No Pirahã refers to abstract concepts or to distant places and times. As a result, Pirahã grammar bucks all sorts of linguistic conventions, according to Everett. The language lacks words for quantities, contains no standard words for colors, shows no sign of expanding or combining sentences through the use of clauses, rarely uses pronouns, employs just two tenses, and features only a few kinship terms, which refer mainly to living relatives. Moreover, the Pirahã tell no creation myths and don’t make up stories or draw pictures. They believe in spirits that they directly encounter at times, “but there’s no great god who created all the spirits, in the Pirahã view.”

A heated controversy in linguistics in recent years involves a few hundred people deep in the Amazonian rainforest: the Pirahã tribe of Northern Brazil. Their idiosyncratic language has raised questions about how widely human languages share certain characteristics. Among the questions at issue is whether the Pirahã language contains recursion, a process through which sentences (and thus languages) can be expanded infinitely. Consider the sentence, “John wrote a book.” We can add to it and, for instance, form noun phrases that contain multiple noun phrases themselves. Thus, “John and the man wrote a book” might be viewed as evidence of recursion. Some linguists, including one who did some early fieldwork on the Pirahã, have argued that their language lacks recursion, making it anomalous among the world’s tongues. Others, including some experts in MIT’s Department of Linguistics, have disagreed with such claims. Many linguists view all languages as having universal affinities that help us understand what is unique about human language.

HOW THE PIRAHÃ PEOPLE BECAME
THE HAPPIEST TRIBE IN THE WORLD?

The Pirahã people are a small hunting and gathering tribe. They live along the coast of the river Amazon, and have a population between 300 and 400. They are known as the people of the Maici river, and as the Happiest Tribe in the world. Depending whether it is a rainy or dry season, the communities can vary. For example, during the rainy season, there were only 20 people in the community Everett lived. But when the dry season came, there were 80 people. The tribe members canoe up and down the Maici river, and visit all the time. They live up to 10 days apart by canoe. Their tribe is positioned some four day boat ride from Porto Velho, Brazil. They are isolated, living right at the edge of the river. The first mention of the Pirahã people is by a Portuguese missionary back in 1784. Simplicity is the answer why the Pirahã people are called the happiest tribe in the world. Simply put, they do not stress about anything non-important. And it is all thank to their language.

– They cannot count and they know only 2 numbers, which are “some” and “many”

– They know only 2 colors, “dark” and “light”

– The Pirahã people know neither dates nor calendars

– They eat just 1 or 2 times per day

– The Pirahã people sleep from time to time for 20 minutes, believing that sleeping for a long time deprives them of powers

Just 350 Pirahã (pronounced Pee-da-HAN) hunt and gather from their simple homes in the Brazilian rainforest. Linguists believe their language is unrelated to any other; racist Brazilian traders say the Pirahã talk like chickens. This obscure Amazonian people speak using only three vowels and eight consonants (including the glottal stop) but their language is far from simple. Like Chinese, for example, Pirahã is tonal and speaking in a different pitch transforms the meaning of a word. Unlike other tonal languages, Pirahã can also be hummed and sung. The Pirahã have no socially lubricating "hello" and "thank you" and "sorry". They have no words for colors, no words for numbers and no way of expressing any history beyond that experienced in their lifetimes.

The Pirahãs have a very basic, virtually non-existent numeric system that is not really based on numbers, but uses words to describe quantity. When you have a tribe or civilization that doesn’t count, it kind of automatically becomes interesting, as it perhaps could lead to a system of more giving and sharing? Don’t let the lack of numbers or one of the simplest languages in the world draw you away from how capable the Pirahãs are. Their language allows them to have conversations with each other just how we do and even whistle their language to communicate while hunting. They are talented enough to walk into the forest empty-handed, without clothes, weapons or tools and come back three days later with baskets of fruits, nuts and a small game. Living in the Amazon, they have mastered the techniques of adapting to their ecosystem, how to avoid animals and even the location and use of important plants. But one of the parts that got me interested in the Pirahãs is how rare it is to come across a tribe that doesn’t believe in God!

"Pirahãs laugh about everything. They laugh at their own misfortune: when someone's hut blows over in a rainstorm, the occupants laugh more loudly than anyone. They laugh when they catch a lot of fish. They laugh when they catch no fish. They laugh when they're full and they laugh when they're hungry... This pervasive happiness is hard to explain, though I believe that the Pirahãs are so confident and secure in their ability to handle anything that their environment throws at them that they can enjoy whatever comes their way. This is not at all because their lives are easy, but because they are good at what they do." "To have sex with someone else's spouse is frowned upon and can be risky, but it happens. If the couple is married to each other, they will just walk off in the forest a ways to have sex. The same is true if neither member of the couple is married. If one or both members of the couple are married to someone else, however, they will usually leave the village for a few days. If they return and remain together, the old partners are thereby divorced and the new couple is married. First marriages are recognized simply by cohabitation. If they do not choose to remain together, then the cuckolded spouses may or may not choose to allow them back. Whatever happens, there is no further mention of it or complaint about it, at least not openly, once the couple has returned. However, while the lovers are absent from the village, their spouses search for them, wail, and complain loudly to everyone. Sometimes the spouses left behind asked me to take them in my motorboat to search for the missing partners, but I never did."

The Piraha people, who live in the depths of the Brazilian jungles, don’t know what the past and the future is, they consider a long sleep dangerous and have no idea what stress is all about. All these nuances make it quite difficult for a modern person to understand them. A missionary who came to the Piraha to teach them about life came to the conclusion that these people are the happiest people on Earth. And years later, he understood that it was actually he who needed to learn from them, not vice versa. The essence of the Piraha’s culture can be explained in a very simple way, “Live in the here and now.” There is only present tense in their language because, according to these people, the only important things that can be conveyed to others are the things are happening at the current moment.

For the Pirahã, the universe is layered, and we happen to live in this biosphere that’s bounded by the sky and the ground, which are just both barriers, so they’re both called “bigí.” There could be entities above that, but they wouldn’t be supernatural entities; they would be entities like us but maybe with different characteristics of some sort. And there could be entities below that. But the Pirahã don’t worry much about that, because they live where they’re at now. They have the simplest kinship system known. They just have a word for “generation above,” no gender distinction, “my generation,” no gender distinction (which is brother, sister, cousin, uncle, anything like that), and “generation below,” without any gender distinction, and then two words for biological son and biological daughter. And that’s it. That’s the Pirahã kinship system. They don’t have any words for colors. They can describe colors — they see colors — but they’ll say, “That looks like blood,” or “That looks like the urucum plant,” or “That looks like water” or “That’s not quite yet ripe” or “That’s transparent” or “That looks like it has an opaque eye.” Those are the ways they describe different colors. They don’t have any words for numbers.

The Piraha are an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Amazonian Indians in Brazil who mainly live on the banks of the Maici River. They are the sole surviving subgroup of the Mura people. They played an important part in Brazilian history during colonial times and were known for their quiet determination and subsequent resistance to the encroaching Portuguese culture. Formerly a powerful people, they were defeated by their neighbors, the Munduruku, in 1788. They currently number about 800, which is sharply reduced from the numbers recorded in previous decades. The Piraha people do not call themselves Pirahas but instead the Hi'aiti'ihi', roughly translated as 'the straight ones'. Most take short naps of 15 minutes to two hours through the day and night, and rarely sleep through the night. They often go hungry, not for want of food, but from a desire to be tigisai - "strong". The Piraha do not have the usual origin stories about mythological gods who came to Earth, created humans, and will one day return. They have an understanding that something greater created the world and the people who dwell within it and follow celestial events to plan their destinies. Their crafts and artwork consist mostly of beaded and shell jewelry and ornaments - as well as stick-figures to ward off evil spirits. They are aware of outside civilizations but prefer to remain as they always existed for as long as nature and humanity allows them to do so.

A tiny tribe living deep in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest has some of the world’s top researchers questioning the fundamentals of human language.The Pirahã tribe speaks a rare and mysterious language of the same name that might be completely different from every other language in the world. It could be missing what some consider a universal characteristic of language: recursion. That theory is controversial, but fairly recent MIT-led research found support for the claim. The study, conducted with the help of well-known linguist Daniel Everett, was the most extensive to date on the Pirahã language. The researchers stressed that the findings are very preliminary. If Pirahã does turn out to lack recursion, however, this fascinating Brazilian language might force linguists to withdraw some long-held beliefs about what defines human language.