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.

Grammar

Stress

Guahibo has a unique and complex stress system with both primary and secondary stress. The stress system shows a sensitivity to syllable weight so that heavy syllables are always stressed. Both contrasting trochaic and iambic patterns are found on morphemes in nonfinal morphemes with more than two syllables: ! Trochaic !! Iambic mátacàbi "day" || (L'L**)(L'L**) 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 wánali "crystal" || (L**'L**)L wayáfo "savannah" pàlupáluma "rabbit" || (L'L**)(L'L**)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) náwa "grass fire" || ('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 nónoj ì "hot peppers" || (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.

Writing system

Phonology

A /w/ sound can also range to a [β] sound within words. Sounds /, / can have allophones of [, ]. Vowels can also be nasalized as /ã, ĩ, ẽ, õ, ũ, ɨ̃/.