Kayabí

Last Updated: 2020-06-30

SLIGHTLY COMPROMISED: possible conflation between /i/ and /j/ due to syllable structure

Background

Language Family: Tupi / Tupi-Guarani / Kayabi

• Kayabí is spoken in Brazil.

Phonology

Consonants

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p	t		k kʷ ɡ	ʔ
Fricatives	f	s
Nasals	m	n		ŋ
Flaps		ɾ
Approximants	w		j
Note: The velar stop with the diacritic (ʷ) is labialized.

Vowels

• Kayabí makes a distinction between oral and nasal vowels (Oliveira Borges E Souza 2004, 24).
• It appears that like-vowel sequences appear (based on vocab in Dobson 1997); however, vowel length is never mentioned as a distinctive feature. They will be treated as sequences.

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

Alphabet

• /ŋ/ is not represented in the Crúbadán corpus.

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
ã	/ã/
e	/e/
ẽ	/ẽ/
f	/f/
g	/ɡ/
i	/i/; /j/	/j/: syllable-finally
ĩ	/ĩ/
j	/j/
k	/k/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
õ	/õ/
p	/p/
r	/ɾ/
s	/s/
t	/t/
u	/u/
ũ	/ũ/
w	/w/
y	/ɨ/
ỹ	/ɨ̃/
’	/ʔ/
Digraph
kw	/kʷ/
ng	/ŋ/

Syllable Structure

• Syllables in Kayabí follow the order of (C)V(C) (Oliveira Borges E Souza 2004, 26).
  • Given the varying syllable structures, /j/ can’t always be transcribed accurately. The rules take into account the environment in which ⟨i⟩ goes to /j/ when followed by CV; however, this doesn’t encompass all the environments in which ⟨i⟩ becomes /j/. Thus, the language is slightly compromised.

Misc. Rules

• /p/, /t/, and /k/ become [w], [ɾ], and [ɡ], respectively, when preceding a vowel-initial morpheme (Oliveira Borges E Souza 2004, 27).
• Consonants may also weaken when morpheme-initial (Oliveira Borges E Souza 2004, 27–28):
  • /p/, /f/, and /m/ may become [w].
  • /n/ and /t/ may become [ɾ].
  • /k/ may become [ŋ].
• Morpheme-final consonants may become elided when preceding a morpheme-initial consonant (Oliveira Borges E Souza 2004, 28).

References

Dobson, Rose. 1997. Gramática Prática Com Exercícios Da Língua Kayabi. Anthropological Linguistics. Vol. 228. Arquivo Lingüístico. Cuiabá: SIL: Cuiabá: SIL: Cuiabá: Sociedade Internacional de Lingüística. http://www.sil.org/americas/brasil/PUBLCNS/DICTGRAM/KBGram.pdf.

Oliveira Borges E Souza, Patrícia de. 2004. “Estudos de Aspectos de Lingua Kaiabi (Tupi).” Master’s thesis, Universidade Estadual de Campinas.