Payaguá (Payawá) is an extinct language of

Paraguay Paraguay, officially the Republic of Paraguay, is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the Argentina–Paraguay border, south and southwest, Brazil to the Brazil–Paraguay border, east and northeast, and Boli ...

Argentina Argentina, officially the Argentine Republic, is a country in the southern half of South America. It covers an area of , making it the List of South American countries by area, second-largest country in South America after Brazil, the fourt ...

, and

Bolivia Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia, is a landlocked country located in central South America. The country features diverse geography, including vast Amazonian plains, tropical lowlands, mountains, the Gran Chaco Province, w ...

, spoken by the

Payaguá The Payaguá people, also called Evueví and Evebe, were an ethnic group of the Guaycuru peoples in the Northern Chaco of Paraguay. The Payaguá were a river tribe, living, hunting, fishing, and raiding on the Paraguay River. The name ''Pa ...

. 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 A language isolate is a language that has no demonstrable genetic relationship with any other languages. Basque in Europe, Ainu and Burushaski in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, Haida and Zuni in North America, Kanoê in South America, and Tiwi ...

. 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 f ...

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: Selkʼnam (or Ona), spoken by the people of the same name who occupied territory in t ...

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

Notes

References

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