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Guahibo, the native language of the Guahibo people, is a Guahiban language that is spoken by about 23,006 people in Colombia and additional 8,428 in Venezuela. There is a 40% rate of monolingualism, and a 45% literacy rate.
| +Consonants ! colspan="2" | !Bilabial !Dental consonant !Alveolar !Palatal !Velar consonant !Glottal |
A /w/ sound can also range to a β sound within words.
| +Vowels ! !Front vowel !Central vowel !Back vowel |
Sounds /, / can have allophones of ,. Vowels can also be nasalized as /ã, ĩ, ẽ, õ, ũ, ɨ̃/.
| + Guahibo alphabet (Kondo 1985) ! Uppercase | E | L | Q | Ts | Y |
| + Unified Guahibo alphabet (1986) | y |
| ! Trochaic !! Iambic |
| (L L )(LL) tulíquisì "bead necklace" |
The binary feet are parsed from left to right within each morpheme. Morphemes with an odd number of syllables leave the final syllable unstressed (and unparsed into feet):
| ! Trochaic !! Iambic |
| (LL)L wayáfo "savannah" |
| (L L )(LL)L culèmayúwa "species of turtle" |
Morphemes that consist of two syllables and are also word-final are an exception to the above and only have the trochaic pattern:
| ! Trochaic !! Iambic (with reversal) |
| (LL) púca "lake" |
These morphemes alternate with an iambic pattern when placed in a nonfinal context. Thus náwa keeps its trochaic pattern with the addition of a single light syllable morpheme like -ta "in":
However, an iambic word show its underlying iamb when it is followed by -ta:
Affixation generally does not affect the stress pattern of each morpheme.
Heavy syllables since they are required to be stressed disrupt perfect trochaic and iambic rhythms. However, morphemes with a sequence of at least two light syllables show contrasting stress patterns:
| ! Trochaic !! Iambic |
| (L L )(H) jútabài "motmot" |
Primary Stress. Primary stress generally falls on the rightmost nonfinal foot. For example, the following word
has primary stress on the rightmost foot ( pa.lu) which is not word-final. However, the rightmost foot ( qui.si) in
is word-final and cannot receive primary stress; the primary stress then falls on the next rightmost foot ( tu.li). Placing a light syllable suffix -ta "with" after a four syllable root shows shifting of primary stress:
With the addition of the suffix, the root-final foot ( ni.lu) is no longer word-final and is subsequently permitted to accept primary stress.
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