Yabarana language
nearly extinct Cariban language
Yabarana is a moribund Cariban language or dialect of Mapoyo, spoken in Venezuela.
Classification
Yawarana is a member of the Cariban language family. Their first mention as such was in 1782 by the Jesuit Filippo Salvatore Gilii, who obtained the information from the Tamanaku. Girard (1971) grouped Yawarana with Mapoyo in his eighth subgroup out of 15 which he had devised for the Cariban family. However, he doubted the close classification of Yawarana with Mapoyo, instead suspecting a close relationship with Pemon. The two are placed in Marshall Durbin's (1977) classification, which is, however, rejected by modern scholarship, with the Panare language, separating them from Tamanaku. A comparative study on Tamanaku in 1990 by Mattei Muller and Henley (1990) found much lexical similarity between Mapoyo, Yawarana, and Tamanaku, but much fewer for Panare and Cumanagoto. Terrence Kaufman's (1994) classification, also outdated, grouped Mapoyo-Yawarana in his Central branch with Yeꞌkuana, Apalaí, and Wayana, also adding Cumanagoto and closely related Chaima. He also described Tamanaku as a synonym of Mapoyo-Yawarana. A "link" between Mapoyo and Yawarana, Pémono, was identified in 1998 by Mattei Muller, and at the time was spoken by only one woman; she died soon after.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q137185971. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1782, 1971, 1977 and 1990.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yabarana 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.