Pirahã

A friend showed me this abstract last year:

The Pirahã language challenges simplistic application of Hockett's nearly universally accepted design features of human language by showing that some of these features (interchangeability, displacement, and productivity) may be culturally constrained. In particular, Pirahã culture constrains communication to nonabstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of interlocutors. This constraint explains a number of very surprising features of Pirahã grammar and culture: the absence of numbers of any kind or a concept of counting and of any terms for quantification, the absence of color terms, the absence of embedding, the simplest pronoun inventory known, the absence of "relative tenses," the simplest kinship system yet documented, the absence of creation myths and fiction, the absence of any individual or collective memory of more than two generations past, the absence of drawing or other art and one of the simplest material cultures documented, and the fact that the Pirahã are monolingual after more than 200 years of regular contact with Brazilians and the Tupi-Guarani-speaking Kawahiv.

From Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã in Current Anthropology, volume 46 (2005), pages 621–646. PDF
Pirahã is also one of the few languages in the word that can be whistled, since tones carry most of the information.
Here are some other relevant links:
http://www.socioambiental.org/pib/epienglish/piraha/ling.shtm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Múra-Pirahã_language
PIRAHA AND WHORF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language