Kambiwá ( Cambioá) is an extinct

unclassified language An unclassified language is a language whose genetic affiliation to other languages has not been established. Languages can be unclassified for a variety of reasons, mostly due to a lack of reliable data but sometimes due to the confounding inf ...

of Brazil. A couple dozen words were collected by Wilbur Pickering during the 1960s from two people living in Barreira,

Petrolândia Petrolândia (''Petroland'', named in honour of Dom Pedro II) is a municipality in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil. It is in the São Francisco Region. Petrolândia has a total area of 1056.6 square kilometers and had an estimated population of ...

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. However, by that time the language had become extinct. The Kambiwá still refer to their original language, and they preserve a few words of it today.

Classificationv

Apart from two apparent borrowings, none of the words are relatable to known languages. Loukotka (1968) characterized the language as unclassifiable due to lack of data.

Vocabulary

In 1961, two word lists of Kambiwá were collected by Wilbur Pickering from elderly rememberers in Barreira,

. The word lists are published in Meader (1978). Word list recorded from Manoel de Souza: : Word list recorded from an elderly man named Tenoro: : Kambiwá words provided by each informant that differ from each other: :

References

* Meader, R. E. 1978
''Indios do nordeste. Levantamento sobre os remanescentes tribais do nordeste brasileiro.''
SIL Internacional. pp 65–92. * Fabre, Alain (2005)
"Kambiwá" (''Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos'')
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kambiwa Language Unclassified languages of South America Indigenous languages of Northeastern Brazil