Taruma language
language
Taruma (Taruamá) is a nearly extinct, divergent language isolate of northeastern South America. It has been reported to be extinct several times since as far back as 1770, but three speakers still live in Maruranau among the Wapishana, and Eithne Carlin is documenting the language. The people and language are known as Saluma by the Tiriyó people in Suriname.
Classification
Taruma is a language isolate. It has been proposed to be distantly related to Katembri, but this relationship has not been repeated in recent surveys of South American languages.
History
Taruma was spoken around the mouth of the Rio Negro during the late 1600s, but the speakers later moved to southern Guyana. In the 1940s, the Taruma tribe were reported to no longer exist as a distinct group. However, their presence has recently been confirmed in the Wapishana village of Marunarau, where they are recognized as a distinct tribe. Only one of the three knows Taruma well enough to produce "coherent texts", and the other two have "a much weaker knowledge" of Taruma.
Language contact
Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Chibchan, Katukina-Katawixi, Arawak, Jeoromitxi, Tupi, Arawa, Jivaro, Karib, Mura-Matanawi, Tukano, Yanomami, and Kwaza language families due to contact.
“Taruma language” enters the record as language. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Taruma and language can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5559094. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1770 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Taruma 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.