Betoi or Betoi-Jirara is an extinct language of Venezuela

Venezuela

Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...

, south of the Apure River

Apure River

The Apure River is a river of southwestern Venezuela, formed by the confluence of the Sarare and Uribante near Guasdualito, in Venezuela, at , and flowing across the llanos into the Orinoco...

 near the modern border with Columbia. The names Betoi and Jirara are those of two of its peoples/dialects; the language proper has no known name. At contact, Betoi was a local lingua franca

Lingua franca

A lingua franca is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both mother tongues.-Characteristics:"Lingua franca" is a functionally defined term, independent of the linguistic...

 spoken between the Uribante and Sarare rivers and along the Arauca

Arauca River

The Arauca River rises in the Andes Mountains of north-central Colombia and ends at the Orinoco in Venezuela. For part of its run it is the boundary between Colombia and Venezuela...

. Enough was recorded for a brief grammatical monograph to be written (Zamponi 2003).

Betoi is generally seen as an isolate, though it has been included in Chibchan-Paezan proposals. Kaufman (2007) included it in Macro-Paesan.