Bororo

WALS coordinates: 16° S, 57° W

spoken in Brazil

Alternative Names

Ethnologue:
Ruhlen:
  • Bororo
Routledge:
    Other:
    • Eastern Bororo
    ISO 639-3:

    Features

    Feature Value References
    Phonology
    Consonant Inventories Small
    Vowel Quality Inventories Large (7-14)
    Consonant-Vowel Ratio Low
    Voicing in Plosives and Fricatives In plosives alone
    Voicing and Gaps in Plosive Systems None missing in /p t k b d g/
    Uvular Consonants None
    Glottalized Consonants No glottalized consonants
    Lateral Consonants No laterals
    The Velar Nasal No velar nasal
    Front Rounded Vowels None
    Syllable Structure Simple
    Tone No tones
    Absence of Common Consonants No fricatives
    Presence of Uncommon Consonants None
    Morphology
    Exponence of Selected Inflectional Formatives No case
    Inflectional Synthesis of the Verb 4-5 categories per word
    Locus of Marking in the Clause Head marking
    Locus of Marking in Possessive Noun Phrases Head marking
    Locus of Marking: Whole-language Typology Inconsistent or other
    Prefixing vs. Suffixing in Inflectional Morphology Weakly suffixing
    Nominal Categories
    Gender Distinctions in Independent Personal Pronouns No gender distinctions
    Person Marking on Adpositions Pronouns and nouns
    Position of Case Affixes Case suffixes
    Position of Pronominal Possessive Affixes Possessive prefixes
    Nominal Syntax
    Obligatory Possessive Inflection Absent
    Possessive Classification Three to five classes
    Verbal Categories
    Position of Tense-Aspect Affixes Tense-aspect suffixes
    The Morphological Imperative No second-person imperatives
    The Prohibitive Special imperative + special negative
    Imperative-Hortative Systems Neither type of system
    Word Order
    Order of Object and Verb VO
    Order of Object, Oblique, and Verb No dominant order
    Position of Interrogative Phrases in Content Questions Initial interrogative phrase
    Simple Clauses
    Alignment of Verbal Person Marking Accusative
    Expression of Pronominal Subjects Subject affixes on verb
    Verbal Person Marking Both the A and P arguments
    Third Person Zero of Verbal Person Marking Zero in some 3sg forms
    Order of Person Markers on the Verb A precedes P
    Passive Constructions Present
    Nonperiphrastic Causative Constructions Morphological but no compound
    Negative Morphemes Negative affix
    Symmetric and Asymmetric Standard Negation Both
    Subtypes of Asymmetric Standard Negation A/Cat
    Predicative Possession Topic
    Predicative Adjectives Verbal encoding
    Nominal and Locational Predication Different
    Zero Copula for Predicate Nominals Possible
    Lexicon
    M-T Pronouns No M-T pronouns
    N-M Pronouns No N-M pronouns