Language name: WARAO
UPSID number: 6852
Alternate name(s):
Classification: South American, Paezan
This language has 21 segments
Its Frequency index is 0.444620420 (average percentage of segments; 0.1: many very rare segments; 0.39: average; 0.7: many common segments)
The language has these sounds: t k kW b h s m n l[ BA j i E a o u i~ E~ a~ o~ u~
Comment: Warao is spoken principally along the Venezuelan coast from the Orinoco delta to the Guyana border. Osborn (1966) lists /p/ rather /b/ as the bilabial stop phoneme, but reports that "the voiced allopyhone [b] is heard more frequently than the voiceless [p]". /t/ "has the allophone [t] in all positions". The alveolar lateral flap occurs as [d] word-initially and as a nonlateral flap before /a/ when preceded by /i,a/. Nasalized vowels occur mostly . Nasality spreads from a nasal consonant to all following vowels and glides between the nasal and a following obstruent or word-boundary but a number of words also have unconditioned nasalized vowels.
Source(s): Osborn, H.A. 1966. Warao I: phonology and morphophonemics. International Journal of American Linguistics 32/2: 108-123.

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