Kaimbe

Kaimbe is an extinct, unclassified language formerly spoken by the Kaimbe people of the Bahia region of Brazil, where a district of the town of Euclides da Cunha still carries the group's name; the ethnic Kaimbe population itself survived and numbered about 1,100 to 1,400 in 1986 and 1,135 in 2020, even after the language itself was lost in the early twentieth century. By 1961 researchers could find only one elderly rememberer, who recalled a small number of words mixed with the neighboring Kiriri language; the linguist Wilbur Pickering collected roughly eight Kaimbe words that year, covering concepts such as fire, smoke, birds and dwellings. The available evidence suggests Kaimbe had already eroded through heavy contact and code-switching with Kiriri well before it went extinct, leaving too little material for any family classification.