Xerénte language
| Xerénte | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Brazil |
| Region | Tocantins |
| Ethnicity | Xerente people |
Native speakers | 1,810 (2000)[1] |
| Official status | |
Official language in |  Brazil (Tocantínia) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | xer |
| Glottolog | xere1240 |
| ELP | Xerente |
The Xerénte or Akwẽ-Xerénte language is an Akuwẽ (Central Jê) language (Jê, Macro-Jê) of Brazil. It is spoken by the Xerente people in the Tocantins state between Rio do Sono and Rio Tocantins.
Phonology
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i ĩ | ɨ | u ũ |
| Close-mid | e ẽ | o õ | |
| Mid | ə ə̃ | ||
| Open-mid | ɛ | ɔ | |
| Open | a |
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | voiceless | p | t | k | ||
| voiced | b | d | ||||
| Fricative | voiceless | s | h | |||
| voiced | z | |||||
| Nasal | m | n | ||||
| Approximant | j | w | ||||
| Flap | ɾ | |||||
Grammar
Personal pronouns[3]
| Person | Nominative | Emphatic | Absolutive | Tense-Aspect-Mood-Person
markers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1S | wa | wahã | ĩ- | wa- |
| 1P | wanõrĩ (nĩ) | - | wa- | |
| 2S | ka, toka | kahã | ai- | bî-, te- |
| 2P | kanõrĩ (kwa), tokanõrĩ | - | ||
| 3S | ta | tahã | Ø-, ã-, ti-, t- | Ø-, mã-, te- |
| 3P | tanõrĩ | tahãnõrĩ |
The nominative and emphatic forms are free morphemes with the function of subject of transitive or intransitive sentences. The absolutive pronoun prefixes mark possessors, objects of postpositions, direct objects, subjects of nominal predicates and subjects of intransitive verbs with post-verbal operators.
Notes
- ^ Xerénte at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ^ "SAPhon – South American Phonological Inventories". linguistics.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2018-08-09.
- ^ Filho, Sinval Martins Sousa (2011-07-05). "Padrões de alinhamento morfossintáticos em Akwe?-Xerente (Jê)". LIAMES: Línguas Indígenas Americanas (in Portuguese). 11 (1): 115–128. doi:10.20396/liames.v0i11.1498. ISSN 2177-7160.