Guató language

Guató is a possible language isolate spoken by 1% of the Guató people of Brazil.

Guató
Native to	Brazil, Bolivia
Region	Mato Grosso do Sul state: Paraguay River banks and up São Lourenço River, along Bolivian border;[1] also Santa Cruz Department (Bolivia): Uberaba Lake[2]
Ethnicity	370 Guató people (2008)[1]
Native speakers	5 (2011)[1]
Language family	language isolate
Language codes
ISO 639-3	gta
Glottolog	guat1253[3]

Classification

Kaufman (1990) provisionally classified Guató as a branch of the Macro-Jê languages, but no evidence for this was found by Eduardo Ribeiro. Martins (2011) also suggests a relationship with Macro-Jê.[4]

Language contact

Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Bororo, Tupi, and Karib language families due to contact.[5]

Distribution

In Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, Guató is spoken on the banks of the Paraguay River and up the São Lourenço River, along the Bolivian border.[6] It is also spoken at Uberaba Lake[2] in Santa Cruz Department (Bolivia).

Phonology

The Guató vowel system, like that of Macro-Jê languages, collapses a three-way distinction of height in oral vowels to two in nasal vowels.[7]

	Oral			Nasal
	Front	Central	Back	Front	Central	Back
Close	i	ɨ	u	ĩ	ɨ̃	ũ
Mid	e		o	ẽ	ã
Open	ɛ	a	ɔ

		Labial	Denti- alveolar	Post- alveolar	Velar	Labio- velar	Glottal
Nasal		m	n
Plosive	voiced	b	d	dʒ	ɡ	ɡʷ
	voiceless	p	t	tʃ	k	kʷ
Fricative		f					h
Sonorant		w	ɾ	j

Vocabulary

Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items for Guató.[2]

gloss	Guató
one	chenéhe
two	dúni
three	chumó
tooth	makuá
tongue	mundokuír
hand	mara
woman	muazya
water	mágũ
fire	matá
moon	múpina
maize	madzyéro
jaguar	mépago
house	movír

For more extensive vocabulary lists of Guató by Palácio (1984)[8][9] and Postigo (2009),[10] see the corresponding Portuguese article.

References

1. Guató at Ethnologue (19th ed., 2016)
2. Loukotka, Čestmír (1968). Classification of South American Indian languages. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center.
3. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Guató". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
4. Martins, Andérbio Márcio Silva. 2011. Uma avaliação da hipótese de relações genéticas entre o Guató e o tronco Macro-Jê. Doutorado em Linguística. Universidade de Brasília.
5. Jolkesky, Marcelo Pinho de Valhery (2016). Estudo arqueo-ecolinguístico das terras tropicais sul-americanas (Ph.D. dissertation) (2 ed.). Brasília: University of Brasília.
6. Eberhard, David M.; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D., eds. (2019). "Brazil languages". Ethnologue: Languages of the World (22nd ed.). Dallas: SIL International.
7. A. P. Palacios, 1984; A. V. Postigo, 2009
8. Palácio, Adair Pimentel. 1984. Guató: a língua dos índios canoeiros do rio Paraguai. Campinas: Univ. Dissertação doutoral, Universidade Estadual de Campinas.
9. Martins, Andérbio Márcio Silva. 2011. Uma avaliação da hipótese de relações genéticas entre o Guató e o tronco Macro-Jê. Dissertação doutoral, Universidade de Brasília.
10. Postigo, Adriana Viana. 2009. Fonologia da língua Guató. Dissertação de mestrado. Três Lagoas: Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul.

• Alain Fabre, 2005, Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos: GUATÓ.