Betoi-Jirara

Betoi-Jirara is an extinct dialect cluster, treated as a language isolate, that was spoken in the Orinoco Llanos region of what is now Colombia and Venezuela, south of the Apure River. Its speakers were resettled into Catholic missions during the seventeenth century, and the language died out by the mid-nineteenth century. Scholars have historically proposed affiliations with the Tucanoan, Chibchan and Chocoan language families, but none of these is well supported by evidence; more recent research by Raoul Zamponi has identified lexical resemblances between Betoi-Jirara and the Saliban languages that may indicate a genuine relationship, though the similarities could instead reflect areal contact rather than common descent, and with only about 150 words of the language attested, Zamponi leaves its genetic affiliation formally unresolved.