Payaguá (Payawá) is an extinct language of

Paraguay Paraguay (; ), officially the Republic of Paraguay ( es, República del Paraguay, links=no; gn, Tavakuairetã Paraguái, links=si), is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the south and southwest, Brazil to th ...

Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...

, and

Bolivia , image_flag = Bandera de Bolivia (Estado).svg , flag_alt = Horizontal tricolor (red, yellow, and green from top to bottom) with the coat of arms of Bolivia in the center , flag_alt2 = 7 × 7 square p ...

, spoken by the Payaguá Indians. It is usually classified as one of the

Guaicuruan languages Guaicuruan (Guaykuruan, Waikurúan, Guaycuruano, Guaikurú, Guaicuru, Guaycuruana) is a language family spoken in northern Argentina, western Paraguay, and Brazil (Mato Grosso do Sul). The speakers of the languages are often collectively called ...

, but the data is insufficient to demonstrate that.

Classification

Viegas Barros (2004) proposes that Payagua may be a Macro-Guaicurúan language.Viegas Barros, José Pedro. 2004. ''Guaicurú no, macro-Guaicurú sí: Una hipótesis sobre la clasificación de la lengua Guachí (Mato Grosso do Sul, Brasil)''. Ms. 34pp. However, Campbell (2012) classifies Payagua as a

language isolate Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The num ...

. An automated computational analysis (

ASJP The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists ...

4) by Müller et al. (2013)Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013.
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'. found lexical similarities between Payagua and the

Chonan languages The Chonan languages are a family of indigenous American languages which were spoken in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. Two Chon languages are well attested: Selk'nam (or Ona), spoken by the people of the same name who occupied territory in the ...

. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing, genetic inheritance, or chance resemblances.

Sources

*Boggiani, G. (1900). Lingüística sudamericana: Datos para el estudio de los idiomas Payagua y Machicui. Trabajos de la 4a sección del Congreso Científico Latinoamericano, 203-282. Buenos Aires: Compañía Sud-Americana de Billetes de Banco. *Schmidt, M. (1949). Los Payaguá. Revista do Museu Paulista N.S., 3:129-317.

Notes

References

* * Languages of Argentina Guaicuruan languages Extinct languages of South America Languages extinct in the 1900s Language isolates of South America Chaco linguistic area {{Argentina-stub