מקיריטרי

Maquiritari (also Ye'kwana, Yekuana, Makiritare, De'kwana) is a Northern Cariban language of the Orinoco-Amazon headwaters region in southern Venezuela and northern Brazil. The Yekuana people are river-dwelling rainforest farmers and traders famous for their basketry (sebucán) and dugout canoe construction. The Yanomami-Yekuana shared territory in Brazil (Roraima) is one of the largest indigenous reserves in South America. Linguistically, Yekuana shows classical Cariban features: ergative-absolutive alignment, complex polypersonal verb morphology, and SOV constituent order. The community is bilingual with Spanish (Venezuela) or Portuguese (Brazil), with active language preservation through the OPIYAJE indigenous organization.