Apalaí

Last Updated: 2020-06-25

Background

Language family: Carib / Northern / East-West Guiana / Wayana-Trio

• Apalaí is spoken in Brazil.

Phonology

Consonants

• E. H. Koehn and Koehn (1995) argues for /b/ as an extremely marginal phoneme (p. iii).

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Bilabial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p	t			k	ʔ
Affricates
Fricatives		s z	ʃ
Nasals	m	n
Flaps		ɾ
Approximants	w			j
Note: Where two phonemes share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

• Nasal vowels are contrastive in Apalaí (E. H. Koehn and Koehn 1971, 3). Nasal vowels are indicated by a tilde (˜) (E. H. Koehn and Koehn 1995, iii).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i	ɨ	u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Alphabet

Grapheme	Phoneme
a	/a/
e	/e/
h	/ʔ/
i	/i/
j	/j/
k	/k/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
p	/p/
r	/ɾ/
s	/s/
t	/t/
u	/u/
w	/w/
x	/ʃ/
y	/ɨ/
z	/z/

Syllable Structure

• Syllables in Apalaí follow the order of (C)V(C) (E. H. Koehn and Koehn 1971, 4).

Misc. Rules

• /k/ may be realized as [ɣ] in unstressed final syllables preceding words beginning with stressed /a/ (E. H. Koehn and Koehn 1971, 3).
• In some dialects, /t/ and /k/ may palatalize following /i/. The palatalization of /t/ may result in some frication (ibid).
• /n/ may be realized as [ɲ] when contiguous with /i/ (ibid.).

References

Koehn, E. H., and S. S. Koehn. 1971. “Fonologia Da Lı́ngua Apalai.” In Estudos Sôbre Lı́nguas E Culturas Indı́genas. Instituto Lingüı́stico de Verão.

———. 1995. Vocabulário Básico Apalaí-Português: Dicionário Da Língua Apalaí. Sociedade Internacional de Lingüística.