Guató language

Guató
Guató
Native to	Brazil, Bolivia
Region	Mato Grosso do Sul state: Paraguay River banks and up São Lourenço River, along Bolivian border; also Santa Cruz Department (Bolivia): Uberaba Lake
Ethnicity	370 Guató people (2006)
Native speakers	5 (2012)
Language family	language isolate
Language codes
ISO 639-3	gta
Glottolog	guat1253
ELP	Guató
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Guató is a possible language isolate spoken by 1% of the Guató people of Brazil.

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.^[3]

Language contact

Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Bororo, Tupi, and Karib language families due to contact.^[4]

An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)^[5] found lexical similarities between Guató and the Zamucoan languages. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing, genetic inheritance, or chance resemblances.

Distribution

Today, Guató is spoken in Guató Indigenous Territory and Baía dos Guató Indigenous Territory.^[6]

Loukotka (1968) reported that 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.^[1] 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]^[8]

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

		Labial	Denti- alveolar	Post- alveolar	Velar	Labio- velar	Glottal
Nasal		m	n
Plosive	voiced	b	d	dʒ	ɡ	ɡʷ
Plosive	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)^[7]^[9] and Postigo (2009),^[8] see the corresponding Portuguese article.

References

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Guató at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
^ ^a ^b ^c Loukotka, Čestmír (1968). Classification of South American Indian languages. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center.
^ 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.
^ Jolkesky, Marcelo Pinho de Valhery (2016). Estudo arqueo-ecolinguístico das terras tropicais sul-americanas (Ph.D. dissertation) (2 ed.). Brasília: University of Brasília.
^ Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013).
^ Epps, Patience; Michael, Lev, eds. (2023). Amazonian Languages: Language Isolates. Volume I: Aikanã to Kandozi-Chapra. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-041940-5.
^ ^a ^b Palácio, Adair Pimentel (1984). Guató: a língua dos índios canoeiros do rio Paraguai (PhD thesis) (in Portuguese). Campinas: Universidade Estadual de Campinas.
^ ^a ^b Postigo, Adriana Viana (2009). Fonologia da língua Guató (MA thesis) (in Portuguese). Três Lagoas: Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul.
^ Martins, Andérbio Márcio Silva (2011). Uma avaliação da hipótese de relações genéticas entre o Guató e o tronco Macro-Jê (PhD thesis) (in Portuguese). Universidade de Brasília.