Cueva is a poorly attested and often misclassified extinct indigenous language

Indigenous peoples of the Americas

The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...

 of Panama

Panama

Panama , officially the Republic of Panama , is the southernmost country of Central America. Situated on the isthmus connecting North and South America, it is bordered by Costa Rica to the northwest, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. The...

. The Cueva were exterminated

Genocide

Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...

 between 1510 and 1535 during Spanish colonization. During the 17th and 18th centuries the Kuna repopulated the Cueva area.

Classification

Loukotka (1968) mistakenly identified a Kuna

Kuna language

The Guna language, spoken by the Kuna people of Panama and Colombia, belongs to the Chibchan language family.-Vowels:Vowels may be short or long.-Consonants:...

 vocabulary from the Darién as Cueva, leading to confusion of Cueva with Kuna in subsequent literature (e.g. Greenberg 1987, Whitehead 1999, Ethnologue 2009), with some authors reporting that Cueva was a dialect of or ancestral to the Kuna language (Adelaar & Muysken 2004:62). The Kuna language and culture are very different from the Cueva.

Loewen (1963) and Constenla Umaña & Margery Peña (1991) have suggested a connection between Cueva and the Chocoan family.