Kanoê language
language
Kanoê or Kapishana is a nearly extinct language isolate of Rondônia, Brazil. It is nearly extinct, with only 5 speakers in a population of about 319 Kanoê people. The Kapishana people now speak Portuguese or other indigenous languages from intermarriage. The language names are also spelled Kapixana, Kapixanã, and Canoé, the last shared with Awa-Canoeiro. The Kanoê people, although disperse in the southeastern part of the state of Rondônia, live mainly along the Guaporé River.
Classification
Although Kanoê is generally considered to be a language isolate, there have been various proposals linking it with other languages and language families.
Van der Voort (2005) observes similarities among Kanoê, Kwaza, and Aikanã, but believes the evidence is not strong enough to definitively link the three languages together as part of a single language family.
Price (1978) proposes a relationship with the Nambikwaran languages, while Kaufman (1994, 2007) suggests that Kunza is related.
Language contact
Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with Kwaza, Aikanã, and the Nambikwaran languages due to contact.
Current status
For a long time Kanoê was too poorly attested to classify.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kanoê language” 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.