Avá-Canoeiro, known as Avá or Canoe, is a minor Tupi–Guaraní language of the state of Goiás, in Brazil.

However, the language has a tendency to transform such words into paroxytones through the process of vowel insertion: Avá-Canoeiro uses a combination of prefixes, clitics, and relational morphemes to mark the person of verb subjects and objects.

Thus, three series of verbal person markers can be highlighted: The third-person pronoun is expressed using the relational prefix i-.

Intransitive descriptive verbs take Series III pronominal clitics to mark their subjects.

Unlike other Tupi-Guaraní languages, Avá-Canoeiro does not have portmanteau personal prefixes that mark simultaneous reference to subject and object—here, only one argument is indicated at a time.

They typically denote: humans (e.g., person, girl, boy); animals and plants (except when talking about a specific referent belonging to someone); elements of nature (e.g., mountain, sky).

Examples of this phenomenon include aɾaɾa “macaw,” originating from *aɾaɾ+a, and kʷaʁa “hole,” derived from *kʷaɾ+a.

The allomorphs are: The translative case marks a noun phrase as indicating the state resulting from a process or the complement of a predicate.

Examples include transformations like “the woman turned into a tapir” or to mark complements, as in “my uncle is the chief.” The unmarked case, indicated by the null suffix {-∅}, occurs in two specific situations: Adverbs encompass a diverse group of words that might belong to other word classes like nouns, postpositions, demonstratives, quantifiers, and descriptive verbs.

These words function as adverbs to convey temporal, locative, quantifying, and modal concepts.

They are primarily identified by their distributional properties: they exhibit flexibility in their syntactic position, appearing at the beginning or end of sentences, although they usually follow nouns and verbs they modify.