Kwaza

Kwaza (also written as Kwazá or Koaiá) is an endangered Amazonian language spoken by the Kwaza people of Brazil. Kwaza is an unclassified language. It has grammatical similarities with neighboring Aikanã and Kanoê, but it's not yet clear if that is due to a genealogical relationship or to contact. Little is known about Kwaza people and language due to the minimal historical sources available; if mentioned in reliable documents, it is usually in reference to its neighbors. What is known, is that the Kwaza people were at one point a nation of a few thousand people, which could be subdivided into various groups. The Kwaza language is threatened by extinction. In 2004, the language was spoken on a day-to-day basis by just 54 people living in the south of the state of Rondônia, Brazil. Of those 54, more than half were children, and half were trilingual, speaking Kwaza, Aikanã, and Portuguese, and some were bilingual, also speaking Portuguese. They live south of the original home of the Kwaza, on the Tuba Rao-Latundê indigenous reserve. Van der Voort (2005) observes similarities among Kwaza, Kanoê, and Aikanã, but believes the evidence is not strong enough to definitively link the three languages together as part of a single language family. Hence, Kwaza is best considered to be a language isolate. An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013) also found lexical similarities between Kwaza and Aikanã. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance. Jolkesky (2016) notes that there are lexical similarities with the Taruma, Arawak, Jeoromitxi, Arawa, Jivaro, Mura-Matanawi, Nambikwara, Peba-Yagua, Aikanã, and Kanoe language families due to contact. The history of the Kwaza people is one marked with tragedy, which may contribute to why their language is endangered. in the 1960s, the Kwaza people lost many of their members due to the opening of the BR-364, an inter-state highway in Brazil connecting the southeast states to the western states.