| Carabayo | |
|---|---|
| Aroje, Amazonas Macusa | |
| Spoken in | Colombia |
| Native speakers | 150 (aerial survey) (date missing) |
| Language family |
Language unknown;
perhaps Yuri |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | cby |
The Carabayo (Yuri, Aroje) are an uncontacted Amazonian people of Colombia living in at least three long houses, one of several suspected uncontacted peoples living along the Rio Puré (now the Río Puré National Park) in the southeastern corner of the country. They are known as the Aroje to the Bora people. Maku and Macusa are pejorative Arawak terms applied to many local languages, not anything specific to Carabayo.
It is often assumed that the Carabayo language and people are a continuation of the Yuri language and people attested from the same area in the 19th century. Indeed, Colombian government publications speak of the "Yuri (Carabayo)", "Carabayo (Yuri)", or "Yuri, Aroje, or Carabayo" as a single people.[1] However, when an accidental encounter with one of the Rio Puré peoples (perhaps the Carabayo) occurred in 1969, only 20% of the words which were collected and for which a Yuri equivalent had been recorded were cognate. This is too low a number for the 1969 Rio Puré language to be a direct descendent of Yuri, though it would appear to be in the same family. (However, the 1969 data is not accessible to scholars, and only three of the collected words are currently known.)[2]