Taruma language

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Taruma (Taruamá) is a nearly extinct, divergent language of northeastern South America. It has been reported to be extinct several times since as far back as 1770, but Eithne Carlin discovered the last three speakers living in Maruranau among the Wapishana, and is documenting the language.^[2][3] The people and language are known as Saluma in Suriname.^[4]

Taruma is unclassified.^[5] It has been proposed to be distantly related to Katembri (Kaufman 1990), but this relationship has not been repeated in recent surveys of South American languages (Campbell 2012).^[6]

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.^[7][4] However, their presence has recently been confirmed in the Wapishana village of Marunarau, where they are recognized as a distinct tribe.^[8] Only one of the three knows Taruma well enough to produce "coherent texts", and the other two have "a much weaker knowledge" of Taruma.^[9]

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.^[10]

The following table illustrates some of the aforementioned borrowing situations:^[10][11]

Similarities with Chibchan (especially with the Magdalena and Dorasque-Changena subgroups) may be due to the former presence of Chibchan speakers in the Northeast Amazons.^[10]: 327 Similarities with Tucanoan suggest that Taruma had originated in the Caquetá basin.^[10]: 348

Loukotka (1968) lists the following basic vocabulary items.^[12]

gloss	Taruma
one	oshiwai
two	dzyowa
three	mikyahahi
head	a-dam
eye	a-tsi
man	gika
water	za
fire	fwa
sun	hwa
jaguar	dun
house	duiya

For a list of Taruma words from Jolkesky (2016),^[10] see the corresponding Portuguese article.

• Meira, Sérgio. (2015). Taruma wordlist. (Manuscript).

Wiktionary has a word list at Appendix:Taruma word lists

• Eithne B. Carlin (2011) "Nested Identities in the Southern Guyana Surinam Corner". In Hornborg & Hill (eds.) Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia.
• Eithne B. Carlin (2006) "Feeling the Need: The Borrowing of Cariban Functional Categories into Mawayana (Arawak)". In Aikhenvald & Dixon (eds.) Grammars in Contact: A Cross-Linguistic Typology, pp. 313–332. Oxford University Press.