Guató is a critically endangered language isolate spoken by the Guató people along the Paraguay and São Lourenço rivers in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, and near Uberaba Lake in Bolivia's Santa Cruz Department. Its classification has long been disputed: linguists Terrence Kaufman and Aryon Rodrigues once proposed a link to the Macro-Jê family, but Andrey Nikulin's 2020 study found no supporting evidence and excluded the connection, leaving Guató formally unclassified. UNESCO records only 2 native speakers as of 2023.
Facts
RegionMato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, and Santa Cruz Department, Bolivia 1 Speaker CountNo year given in the cited extract; the existing entity description gives a 2023 UNESCO count of two. Proto-Language StatusFormally unclassified; a proposed Macro-Je affiliation (Kaufman 1990, Rodrigues 1999, Martins 2011) found no supporting evidence in Ribeiro and van der Voort (2010) and was excluded by Nikulin (2020). 1 In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Guato Language
Wikimedia FoundationGeographical distribution section: Loukotka 1968 range
in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, Guató was spoken on the banks of the Paraguay River and up the São Lourenço River, along the Bolivian border. It was also spoken at Uberaba Lake in Santa Cruz Department, Bolivia.
Geographical distribution section: remaining speakers sentence
All residents speak only Portuguese, and the two remaining speakers live elsewhere.
Classification section: Kaufman/Rodrigues/Nikulin
Terrence Kaufman (1990) provisionally classified Guató as a branch of the Macro-Jê languages, as did Aryon Rodrigues (1999) and Martins (2011), but no evidence for this was found by Eduardo Ribeiro and Hein van der Voort (2010). Andrey Nikulin (2020) excludes this possibility.
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