Quechua, also called Runasimi in Southern Quechua, is an indigenous language family that originated in central Peru and thereafter spread to other countries of the Andes. Derived from a common ancestral "Proto-Quechua" language, it is today the most widely spoken pre-Columbian language family of the Americas, with the number of speakers estimated at 8–10 million speakers in 2004, and just under 7 million from the most recent census data available up to 2011. Approximately 13.9% of Peruvians speak a Quechua language.
The Guarani are a group of culturally-related indigenous peoples of South America. They are distinguished from the related Tupi by their use of the Guarani language. The traditional range of the Guarani people is in what is now Paraguay between the Paraná River and lower Paraguay River, the Misiones Province of Argentina, southern Brazil once as far east as Rio de Janeiro, and parts of Uruguay and Bolivia.
Chibcha, Mosca, Muisca, Muysca, or Muysca de Bogotá is a language spoken by the Muisca people of the Muisca Confederation, one of the many indigenous cultures of the Americas. The Muisca inhabit the Altiplano Cundiboyacense of what today is the country of Colombia.
Tacanan is a family of languages spoken in Bolivia, with Ese’ejja also spoken in Peru. It may be related to the Panoan languages. Many of the languages are endangered.
Yuracaré is an endangered language isolate of central Bolivia in Cochabamba and Beni departments spoken by the Yuracaré people.
Matsés, also referred to as Mayoruna in Brazil, is an Indigenous language utilized by the inhabitants of the border regions of Brazil-Peru. A term that hailed from Quechua origin, Mayoruna translates in English to mayu = river; runa = people. Colonizers and missionaries during the 17th century used this term to refer to the Indigenous peoples that occupied the lower Ucayali Region, Upper Solimões and Vale do Javari.
Cavineña is an indigenous language spoken on the Amazonian plains of northern Bolivia by over 1,000 Cavineño people. Although Cavineña is still spoken, it is an endangered language. Guillaume (2004) states that about 1200 people speak the language, out of a population of around 1700. Nearly all Cavineña are bilingual in Spanish.
The Kallawaya are an indigenous group living in the Andes of Bolivia. They live in the Bautista Saavedra Province and Muñecas Province of the La Paz Department but are best known for being an itinerant group of traditional healers that travel on foot to reach their patients. According to the UNESCO Safeguarding Project, the Kallawaya can be traced to the pre-Inca period as direct descendants of the Tiwanaku and Mollo cultures, meaning their existence has lasted approximately 1,000 years. They are known to have performed complex procedures like brain surgery alongside their continuous use of medicinal plants as early as 700 AD. Most famously, they are known to have helped to save thousands of lives during the construction of the Panama Canal, in which they used traditional plant remedies to treat the malaria epidemic. Some historical sources even cite the Kallawayas as the first to use quinine to prevent and control malaria. In 2012, there were 11,662 Kallawaya throughout Bolivia.
The Toromona are an indigenous people of Bolivia. They are uncontacted people living near the upper Madidi and Heath Rivers in northwestern Bolivia. Bolivia's Administrative Resolution 48/2006, issued on 15 August 2006, created an "exclusive, reserved, and inviolable" portion of the Madidi National Park to protect the Toromona.
Moxo is any of the Arawakan languages spoken by the Moxo people of the Llanos de Moxos in northeastern Bolivia. The two extant languages of the Moxo people, Trinitario and Ignaciano, are as distinct from one another as they are from neighboring Arawakan languages. The extinct Magiana was also distinct.
The Intercontinental Dictionary Series is a large database of topical vocabulary lists in various world languages. The general editor of the database is Bernard Comrie of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. Mary Ritchie Key of the University of California, Irvine is the founding editor. The database has an especially large selection of indigenous South American languages and Northeast Caucasian languages.
Camba is a word historically used in Bolivia to refer to the indigenous population in the eastern tropical region of the country, or to those born in the area of Santa Cruz, Beni, and Pando. Nowadays, the term "Camba" is used predominantly to refer to eastern Bolivian populations of mixed Spanish, Chane, and other indigenous Amazonian descent born in the eastern lowlands in and around Santa Cruz de la Sierra.
The Chiquitano or Chiquitos are an indigenous people of Bolivia, with a small number also living in Brazil. The Chiquitano primarily live in the Chiquitania tropical savanna of Santa Cruz Department, Bolivia, with a small number also living in Beni Department and in Mato Grosso, Brazil. In the 2012 census, self-identified Chiquitanos made up 1.45% of the total Bolivian population or 145,653 people, the largest number of any lowland ethnic group. A relatively small proportion of Bolivian Chiquitanos speak the Chiquitano language. Many reported to the census that they neither speak the language nor learned it as children. The Chiquitano ethnicity emerged among socially and linguistically diverse populations required to speak a common language by the Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos.
The Ese Ejja are an indigenous people of Bolivia and Peru, in the southwestern Amazon basin. 1,687 Ese Ejja live in Bolivia, in the Pando and Beni Departments, in the foothills along the Beni and the Madre de Dios Rivers. In Peru, they live along the Tambopata and Heath Rivers, near Puerto Maldonado.
Pacahuara people are an indigenous people of Bolivia. A small group live in Tujuré, a community located near the Chácobo people on the Alto Ivón River in the Beni Department. The group only consists of four people. The fifth, a 57-year-old woman, died on 31 December 2016 in the village of Tujure in the north-east of the country. Another uncontacted group of Pacahuara, with 50 members in eight families, lives between Rio Negro and Río Pacajuaras in the Pando of northeastern Bolivia, near the Brazilian border.
The indigenous languages of South America are those whose origin dates back to the pre-Columbian era. The subcontinent has great linguistic diversity, but, as the number of speakers of indigenous languages is diminishing, it is estimated that it could become one of the least linguistically diverse regions of the planet.
The Araona people are an ethnic group in Bolivia. Their population was 228 according to the 2012 census. Their language is the Araona language which is spoken by 711 people although many speak Spanish as well. The Araonans live in the headwaters of the Manupari river in northwest Bolivia. According to Alfred Métraux the Araona people and the Cavineño people are so intermixed with other Takanan-speaking peoples that it can be difficult to treat them separately.
The Cavineño People are an ethnic group in Bolivia. They mainly live along the Beni and Madidi rivers. There were 3,884 of them in 2012 of whom 1,173 speak the Cavineña language natively. Almost all of them speak Spanish as well. According to Alfred Métraux the Cavineño and the Araona people are so intermixed with other Takanan-speaking peoples that it can be difficult to treat them separately.
The Jesuit Missions of Moxos are located in the Llanos de Moxos of Beni department in eastern Bolivia. Distinguished by a unique fusion of European and Amerindian cultural influences, the missions were founded as reductions or reducciones de indios by Jesuits in the 17th and 18th centuries to convert local tribes to Christianity.
Periodic tense is a subtype of the grammatical category of tense, which encodes that the event expressed by the verb occurs within a particular period of the day or of the year. Its does not encode a relation to a particular point of reference, unlike deictic tense, the grammatical expression of time reference relative either to the moment of speaking or to another point of reference.
Bolivia 