Yuracaré is an endangered

Endangered language

An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language"....

 language isolate

Language isolate

A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single...

 of central Bolivia

Bolivia

Bolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...

 in Cochabamba

Cochabamba Department

Cochabamba is one of the nine component departments of Bolivia. It is known to be the "granary" of the country because of its variety of agricultural products due to Cochabamba's geographical position. It has an area of 55,631 km². Its population, in the 2007 census, was 1,750,000...

 and Beni

Beni Department

Beni, sometimes El Beni, is a northeastern department of Bolivia, in the lowlands region of the country. It is the second largest department in the country , covering 213,564 square kilometers , and it was created by supreme decree on November 18, 1842 during the administration of General José...

 departments spoken by the Yuracaré

Yuracaré

Yuracaré are South American indigenous people living on 2,500 square kilometres along the Chapare River watershed in Cochabamba Department and Beni Department, in the Bolivian Lowlands of the Amazon Basin. The Yuracaré reside not far from Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Cochabamba, among the forests...

 people.

There are approximately 2,500 speakers. These numbers are in decline as the youngest generation no longer learns the language. (See Language death

Language death

In linguistics, language death is a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language variety is decreased, eventually resulting in no native and/or fluent speakers of the variety...

.)

Yuracaré is documented with a grammar based on an old missionary manuscript by de la Cueva (Adam 1893). The language is currently being studied by Rik van Gijn. A Foundation for Endangered Languages

Foundation for Endangered Languages

The Foundation for Endangered Languages is a non-profit organization, registered as Charity 1070616 in England and Wales, founded in 1996. Its current chairman is Nicholas Ostler....

 grant was awarded for a Yuracaré–Spanish / Spanish–Yuracaré dictionary project in 2005.

Genealogical relations

Suárez (1977) suggests a relationship between Yuracaré and the Mosetenan, Pano–Tacanan, Arawakan, and Chon

CHON

CHON is an mnemonic acronym for the four most common elements in living organisms: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen....

 families. His earlier Macro-Panoan proposal is the same minus Arawakan (Suárez 1969).

Grammar

• Verb-initial
• agglutinating
• prefixes, suffix
  Suffix
  In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...
  
  es
• reduplication
  Reduplication
  Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word is repeated exactly or with a slight change....
  
  

External links

• Ethnologue: Yuracare
• Proel: Lengua Yurakare
• FEL Grants 2005 (Foundation for Endangered Languages)
• DoBeS : General presentation of the Yurakaré language and people