Xavante

Xavante (ISO 639-3: xav), called A’uwẽ mreme by its speakers, is a Central Jê language of the Macro-Jê stock spoken by roughly 12,000–15,000 people in Indigenous communities of eastern Mato Grosso, Brazil. It remains the principal community language and is transmitted to children, although Portuguese is widely used in outside relations. Its sound system has nine oral and four nasal vowel qualities with contrastive length and a relatively small consonant inventory; stops have context-dependent oral, nasal, and prenasalized realizations. Clause structure includes object-agent-verb order in ergative constructions, and morphology marks person, number, aspect, and social distinctions such as honorific and endearment forms. Xavante is written in Latin-based orthographies used in Indigenous schools and publications, but communities differ in some spelling conventions.