Tequiraca–Canichana languages
Encyclopedia
Tequiraca–Canichana is a possibly language family
proposed in Kaufman
(1994) uniting two erstwhile language isolate
s, Canichana
of Bolivia and Tequiraca of Peru, both of which are either extinct or nearly so.
Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...
proposed in Kaufman
Terrence Kaufman
Terrence Kaufman is an American linguist specializing in documentation of unwritten languages, Mesoamerican historical linguistics and language contact phenomena. He is currently a professor at the department of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh....
(1994) uniting two erstwhile language isolate
Language isolate
A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single...
s, Canichana
Canichana language
Canichana, or Canesi, is a possible language isolate of Bolivia . As of 1991 there were 500 Canichana people, but only 20 spoke the Canichana language; by 2000 the ethnic population was 583, but the language was extinct.-References:...
of Bolivia and Tequiraca of Peru, both of which are either extinct or nearly so.