UCLA

Xavante (Glottocode: xava1240) is an indigenous language located in Central Brazil, with approximately 15,315 Xavante speakers dispersed throughout six Brazilian indigenous lands. The variety focused on in this thesis is located within the villages Ẽtênhiritipá and Wede’rã in the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land in the state of Mato Grosso. Novel fieldwork data collection reveals that Xavante exhibits typologically unusual linguistic features, including the absence of velar consonants and, even stranger, the disallowance of non-labial codas, raising questions about the markedness hierarchy, and particularly the status of labials in the absence of other places of articulation.