Maquiritari

Ye’kwana, also known as Maquiritari and De’kwana, is a Cariban language spoken by Ye’kwana communities in southern Venezuela, especially in Amazonas and Bolívar states, and in northern Brazil’s Roraima state. Communities are distributed around tributaries of the upper Orinoco and upper Rio Negro, across an international border that creates different patterns of contact with Spanish and Portuguese. Linguistic descriptions characterize Ye’kwana as predominantly head-final: objects precede verbs, clauses with an overt subject tend toward subject–object–verb order, and adpositions are postpositions. Verbs have rich morphology indexing participants and marking tense, aspect, and mood. The language displays ergative patterns in parts of its grammar alongside other alignment patterns, so describing the entire system as uniformly ergative-absolutive would be an oversimplification.

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