| 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. |