Guajiboan languages
language family spoken in the Orinoco River region in eastern Colombia and southwestern Venezuela
Guajiboan (also Guahiban, Wahívoan, Guahiboan) is a language family spoken in the Orinoco River region in eastern Colombia and southwestern Venezuela, a savanna region known as the Llanos.
Family division
Guajiboan consists of 5 languages:
Churuya is now extinct. It was formerly spoken in Meta, Colombia.
Macaguane is listed as a dialect of Guajibo in Kaufman (1994) and Campbell (1997). Gordon (2005) lists Playero (also Rio Arauca Guahibo), a dialect of Guajibo, as a separate language with a "low intelligibility of other Guahibo".
Guajibo and Cuiva form a dialect continuum.
Guajibo has the most speakers (over 23,000) and is the largest indigenous group in eastern Colombia. Approximately 9,000 in Venezuela.
Guayabero is the most divergent language of the family.
Genetic relations
Guajiboan has often been grouped together with Arawakan, Arauan, and Candoshi by many classifiers.
The public source identifies “Guajiboan languages” as language family spoken in the Orinoco River region in eastern Colombia and southwestern Venezuela. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Guajiboan, languages and language.
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Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q944056. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1997 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Guajiboan languages” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.