अगुआरुना

Aguaruna (Awajún chichám, "Awajún speech") is the largest Jivaroan language, spoken by ~50,000-55,000 Awajún people in the Peruvian Amazon — Andes ecotone region. The Jivaroan family is a small isolated South American family of 4-5 closely related languages (Shuar jiv, Achuar acu, Huambisa, Shiwiar, Awajún agr) whose homeland straddles the Peru-Ecuador border in the Marañón River basin. Awajún speakers are ethnically related to but linguistically distinct from Ecuadorian Shuar; mutual intelligibility is partial. Awajún has retained Jivaroan family features: nasal vowels, focus markers, classifier-noun constructions, and an exhaustive ethnobiological lexicon for the rainforest. The 2009 Bagua massacre brought international attention to Awajún land rights.