Warekena (Guarequena), or more precisely Warekena of Xié, is an

Arawakan language Arawakan (''Arahuacan, Maipuran Arawakan, "mainstream" Arawakan, Arawakan proper''), also known as Maipurean (also ''Maipuran, Maipureano, Maipúre''), is a language family that developed among ancient indigenous peoples in South America. Branc ...

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

and of

Maroa Municipality The Maroa Municipality ( es, Municipio Maroa) is one of the seven municipalities (municipios) that makes up the southern Venezuelan state of Amazonas and, according to the 2011 census by the National Institute of Statistics of Venezuela, the mun ...

Venezuela Venezuela (; ), officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela ( es, link=no, República Bolivariana de Venezuela), is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many islands and islets in ...

, spoken near the

Guainia River The Rio Negro ( pt, Rio Negro, br ; es, Río Negro} "''Black River''"), or Guainía as it is known in its upper part, is the largest left tributary of the Amazon River (accounting for about 14% of the water in the Amazon basin), the largest b ...

. It is one of several languages which go by the generic name Baré and ''Baniwa/Baniva'' – in this case, distinguished as Baniva de Maroa or Baniva de Guainía. According to Aikhenvald (1999), there are maybe 10 speakers in Brazil and about 200 in Venezuela. Kaufman (1994) classified it in a Warekena group of Western Nawiki Upper Amazonian, Aikhenvald (1999) in Eastern Nawiki. Personal pronouns in Warekena are formed by adding an emphatic suffix ''-ya'' to the cross-referencing personal prefixes.Aikenvald, Alexandra Y. 1988. "Warekena". In Desmond C. Derbyshire & Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds.), ''Handbook of Amazonian languages'', iv. 225–439. Berlin: Moutin de Gruyter. Cited in Bhat, D.N.S. 2004. ''Pronouns.'' Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 25

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

/u/ can also range to

Grammar

Unmarked constituent order is AVO, VS_o, S_aV, or S_ioV. Indirect objects tend to be placed immediately after the predicate.

References

Languages of Brazil Languages of Venezuela Arawakan languages {{Arawakan-lang-stub