Warao

Warao (the autonym means "boat-people" — wa "canoe" + arao "people of") is a language isolate spoken in the Orinoco Delta of eastern Venezuela by ~28,000 speakers, with smaller groups in adjacent Guyana and Suriname. The Warao are riverine canoe-builders whose language has been resistant to genealogical classification — proposals linking it to Macro-Paezan or to Chibchan have not gained acceptance. Warao has unusually rich vocabulary for water, boats, and aquatic life reflecting their delta environment, and uses ergative-like alignment patterns with extensive use of nominal-clause structures. Maintained by relative isolation in the swampy delta, but increasingly under pressure from Spanish.