Shipibo dictionary
Words from the Ucayali
Shipibo-Konibo is the language of the Shipibo-Konibo people along the Ucayali river in the Peruvian Amazon. It is the language of the rao bewa, the healing songs of the plants, and the language in which the things of the dieta carry their names.
Here you will find the core vocabulary and a selection of words from ceremony, plant medicine and kené. You can search in both directions, in Shipibo or in your own language. Click a word to see its meaning in the other languages and its source.
About the spelling
All words follow today’s official Shipibo-Konibo orthography. The alphabet: a, b, ch, e, i, j, k, m, n, o, p, r, s, sh, t, ts, w, x, y.
e sounds like a dull, unrounded i, similar to Russian ы. j is a breathy h. x is an sh with the tip of the tongue curled back, sh an ordinary sh. An n after a vowel usually marks that vowel as nasal. Words ending in -ti are verbs in their base form, and a hyphen as in na- marks a prefix.
Sources
The core vocabulary comes from the Intercontinental Dictionary Series (Mary Ritchie Key and Bernard Comrie, eds., Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig), Shipibo-Conibo contribution. It is based on the Diccionario shipibo-castellano by James Loriot, Erwin Lauriault and Dwight Day (1993) and is licensed under CC BY 4.0. For this page the phonemic transcription was converted to today’s spelling and the meanings were translated into five languages. Loanwords are marked «from Spanish».
The words from ceremony, medicine and kené are sourced individually; the sources are shown with each word.
A dictionary is no substitute for learning from Shipibo teachers. Meanings can differ by region, family and context.