Betoi Language

The Betoi language, part of the small Betoi-Jirara dialect cluster, was an unclassified and now extinct language of the Orinoco Llanos region, spoken south of the Apure River near the modern border of Colombia and Venezuela. Its speakers were resettled into Catholic missions during the 1600s, and by 1760 the language was already endangered and being replaced by Spanish, with the last speakers gone by the mid-nineteenth century. Documentation is extremely limited, consisting mainly of Jesuit records amounting to roughly one hundred fifty words across all its varieties, of which the Betoi dialect itself is the best attested, through surviving grammatical sketches and prayer translations; researchers have proposed Tucanoan, Chibchan, Chocoan, and Saliban connections for the language at various times, but none of these classifications is supported by solid linguistic evidence.