[4] Yawalapiti and Waurá, an Arawakan language belonging to the same subgroup, share a very similar phonemic inventory.
The palatal [c] appears to be an allophone of /k/ occurring before the front vowel /i/, e.g. [puˈluka] "countryside" vs. [naˈciɾu] "my aunt".
[10] Simple vowels can form various diphthongs, mainly /iu, ui, ia, ai, au, ua, ɨu, uɨ/.
[11] As other Arawakan languages, Yawalapiti is agglutinative and makes use of affixes, especially suffixes, to convey basic grammatical relations.
The main classifiers found in Yawalapiti refer to the shape of an object or some other characteristic of it, like texture, length and position.
In vowel initial nouns and verbs, the forms ni- and pi- are frequently used with roots beginning in u, while the prefix aw- appears systematically before a.
In nouns and verbs beginning in consonant, the form ti- occurs only when the root starts with h (in all the other cases, hi- is used).
When nouns beginning with p, k, t, m, n, w and j are modified by the prefix of second person singular or plural, their initial sounds are subject to the following morphophonemic changes.