Yaminawa language

The vowels of Yaminawa are /a, i, ɯ, u/. /i, ɯ, u/ can also be heard as [ɪ, ɨ, o]. is heard as an allophone of /ɾ/. /j/ can also be heard as a nasal . Yawanawá has a similar phonemic inventory to Yaminawa, but uses a voiced bilabial fricative in place of the voiceless bilabial fricative . Yawanawá and Sharanahua have an additional phoneme, the voiced labio-velar approximant . Shanewana has a labiodental fricative instead of . Yaminawa has contrastive tone, with two surface tones, high (H) and low (L). ==Grammar==

Yaminawa is a polysynthetic, primarily suffixing language that also uses compounding, nasalization, and tone alternations in word-formation. Yaminawa exhibits split ergativity; nouns and third person pronouns pattern along ergative-absolutive lines, while first and second person pronouns pattern along nominative-accusative lines. Yaminawa verbal morphology is extensive, encoding affective (emotional) meanings and categories like associated motion. Yaminawa also has a set of switch reference enclitics that encode same or different subject relationships as well as aspectual relationships between the dependent (marked) clause and the main clause. ==Notes==