Caquetio was an Arawakan language of the Northern Ta-Arawakan branch, formerly spoken along the shores of Lake Maracaibo, the coastal areas of Venezuela's Falcon state, and the Dutch islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao, with the Caquetio people's range also extending into Yaracuy, Portuguesa and the Apure river areas. The Caquetio are recorded as having switched to Papiamento by 1800, and the language is now extinct, its speakers having migrated northwest from the Middle to Upper Orinoco around 500 BCE before eventually reaching the Caribbean islands. Only short wordlists collected by researchers in the 1880s survive as direct documentation, though many place names and personal names in Falcon and the ABC islands preserve Caquetio vocabulary.
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