A Year in Language, Day 218: Kaingang Kaingang is a native language of Brazil spoken by some 10-20,000 people. Kaingang is a member of the Gê (also spelled Jê) language family, the languages of which define a macro-ethnic group of the same name throughout southern Brazil. Like many native Brazilian languages, Kaingang is notable for its extensive use of nasality, not just as a feature of vowels but also consonants. In fact, the voiced stops /b/, /d/, /ɟ/, and /g/ are allophonic with the corresponding nasal consonants /m/, /n/, /ɲ/ and /ŋ/, meaning that both are realizations of the same underlying sound in different phonetic environments, kind of like how English "t" is pronounced like a "ch" before an "r". Most of the native languages of the Americas, both in general and among these posts, are polysynthetic i.e. exhibit a high degree of inflection and derivation allowing for the creation of single word sentences. Kaingang, however, is on the opposite end of the spectrum; it is analytic language, using word order and postopositions for grammar.
