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

Guató people The Guató are an indigenous people living on the upper Paraguay River, along the border of modern-day Brazil and Bolivia. They aided the Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the l ...

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.

Language contact

Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the

Bororo The Bororo are indigenous people of Brazil, living in the state of Mato Grosso. They also extended into Bolivia and the Brazilian state of Goiás. The Western Bororo live around the Jauru and Cabaçal rivers. The Eastern Bororo ( Orarimogodoge) ...

, Tupi, and Karib language families due to contact. An automated computational analysis ( ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)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)
'. found lexical similarities between Guató and the

Zamucoan languages Zamucoan (also Samúkoan) is a small language family of Paraguay (northeast Chaco) and Bolivia ( Santa Cruz Department). The family has hardly been studied by linguists (as of Adelaar & Muysken 2004), although several studies have recently app ...

. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing, genetic inheritance, or chance resemblances.

Distribution

In Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, Guató is spoken on the banks of the

Paraguay River The Paraguay River (Río Paraguay in Spanish, Rio Paraguai in Portuguese, Ysyry Paraguái in Guarani) is a major river in south-central South America, running through Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina. It flows about from its headwaters i ...

and up the São Lourenço River, along the Bolivian border. It is also spoken at Uberaba Lake in

Santa Cruz Department (Bolivia) Santa Cruz () is the largest of the nine constituent departments of Bolivia, occupying about one-third (33.74%) of the country's territory. With an area of , it is slightly smaller than Japan or the US state of Montana. It is located in the ...

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.

Vocabulary

Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items for Guató. : For more extensive vocabulary lists of Guató by Palácio (1984)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. and Postigo (2009),Postigo, Adriana Viana. 2009. ''Fonologia da língua Guató''. Dissertação de mestrado. Três Lagoas: Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul. see the corresponding Portuguese article.

References

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

{{DEFAULTSORT:Guato language Macro-Jê languages Languages of Brazil Indigenous languages of South America (Central) Endangered indigenous languages of the Americas Language isolates of South America