Abstract
This work is a statistical analysis of the frequency of occurrence of the phonemes in texts of the type marácunúca ‘what has been heard’ (or ‘traditional talks’) in the Chibchan language Maleku as spoken in Palenque Margarita. The results show that the vowels are more frequent than the consonants. The most common vowel is (long or short) /a/, followed by /i/, /e/, /u/ and /o/. Regarding the consonants, the most used are /k/, /t/, /n/ and /m/, while /ɬ/ and /s/ are the least frequent ones.
Key Words: Maleku language; phonology; frequency of occurrence of phonemes; corpus linguistics; quantitative linguistics