Bororo language

Bororo (Borôro), also known as Boe, is the sole surviving language of the small Bororoan family believed by some to be part of the Macro-Jê languages. It is spoken by the Bororo, hunters and gatherers in the central Mato Grosso region of Brazil.

Bororo has a mid-sized phonemic inventory of seven vowels and fifteen consonants. Orthographic representations, when they differ from IPA, are shown in angle brackets (all from Nonato 2008, based on Americanist transcription).

The vowel system of Bororo is somewhat cross-linguistically unusual in that it distinguishes roundedness only in its back vowels (although Crowell (1979) analyzes unrounded “back” vowels as central).

The mid vowels /e ɤ o/ alternate with the open-mid (or "lax") vowels [ɛ ʌ ɔ] in apparent free variation.

The unrounded back vowels /ɯ ɤ/ become central [ɨ ɘ] word-finally. Furthermore, [ɘ] (i.e. word-final /ɤ/) is not distinguished from, and often surfaces as, front [ɛ]. As a result, /ɤ/ and /e/ are at least partially merged word-finally.

Bororo has a rich inventory of twelve diphthongs:

All pure vowels can also occur long, i.e. as /iː eː ɯː ɤː uː oː aː/. In contrast to other languages with phonemic vowel length, however, these are quite rare, and there seems to be no reason to distinguish long vowels from same-vowel sequences. This is evidenced by the mandatory lengthening of monosyllables, where the vowel of a monosyllable is repeated to form a long vowel: for example, /ba/ "village" becomes /baa̯/ [baː].

Unusually for a South American language, Bororo has no phonemic fricatives.