Yuri language (Amazon)

Yurí
Xurúpixuna
Spoken in Brazil, extending slightly into Colombia
Region Caquetá river
Coordinates
Native speakers ?  (date missing)
Language family
Ticuna–Yurí ?
  • Yurí
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Linguist List 0io

Yurí (Jurí) is, or was, a language previously spoken near a stretch of the Caquetá River in the Brazilian Amazon, extending slightly into Colombia. A small amount of data was collected on two occasions in the 19th century, in 1853 and 1867. Kaufman (1994:62, after Nimuendajú 1977:62) notes that there is lexical evidence to support a link with Ticuna in a Ticuna-Yurí language family, though the data has never been explicitly compared (Hammarström 2010).

It is commonly assumed that the Yuri people and language survive among the uncontacted people or peoples the Rio Puré region, now the Río Puré National Park. Indeed, "Yuri" is often used as a synonym for the only named people in the area, the Carabayo. A list of words collected n 1969 from the, or one of the, Río Puré peoples was 20% cognate with Yuri, suggesting the possibility of a Rio Pure language family though not direct descent (Hammarström 2010).

References