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. |