Maipure language

Maipure is an extinct Arawakan language formerly spoken along the Ventuari, Sipapo and Autana rivers of the Upper Orinoco region in Venezuela's Amazonas state, its speech community having disappeared by the late eighteenth century as missionization dispersed speakers into multilingual communities that rapidly adopted Spanish. The Italian missionary and linguist Filippo S. Gilij documented the only significant record of the language, primarily through his 1780 work Saggio di storia americana, and in 1783 was the first to identify similarities between Maipure and a number of other languages now classified as Arawakan; his classification around Maipure gave the entire family, now comprising roughly 65 languages, its alternate name, Maipurean.