Matanawi is an extinct language isolate of the Amazon, once spoken along the Castanha and Madeirinha rivers, tributaries of the Madeira River, in what is now Amazonas state, Brazil. It is known solely from a wordlist recorded by the ethnographer Curt Nimuendaju in 1925, the only documentation to survive. Nimuendaju himself proposed in 1922 that Matanawi was distantly related to the Mura language, including its Piraha dialect, in a grouping now called Mura-Matanawi, though the relationship rests on limited comparative evidence since Matanawi is extinct and Piraha is highly divergent from other Mura varieties.
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