Cueva language

Cueva was an Indigenous language of Panama, now extinct, with limited attestation and often misclassified within linguistic studies.^[2] The Cueva people experienced a significant population decline between 1510 and 1535 due to conflicts, diseases, and the effects of Spanish colonization. By the 17th and 18th centuries, the Guna had migrated into the former Cueva territory, repopulating the area.

Cueva
Native to	Panama
Region	Darién
Ethnicity	Cueva people
Extinct	16th century
Language family	unclassified (Chocoan? Chibchan? Arawakan?[1])
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)
Glottolog	cuev1238

Classification

Loukotka (1968)^[3] mistakenly identified a Guna vocabulary from the Darién as Cueva, leading to confusion of Cueva with Guna in subsequent literature (e.g. Greenberg 1987, Whitehead 1999, Ethnologue 2009), with some authors reporting that Cueva was a dialect of or ancestral to the Guna language (Adelaar & Muysken 2004:62). The Guna language and culture are very different from the Cueva.

Loewen (1963) and Constenla Umaña & Margery Peña (1991) have suggested a connection between Cueva and the Chocoan family.

Bibliography

• Adelaar, Willem F. H.; & Muysken, Pieter C. (2004). The languages of the Andes. Cambridge language surveys. Cambridge University Press.
• Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
• Constenla Umaña, Adolfo; & Margery Peña, Enrique. (1991). Elementos de fonología comparada chocó. In Filología y lingüística (No. 17, 1–2, pp. 137–191). San José: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica.
• Greenberg, Joseph H. (1987). Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Loewren, Jacob A. (1963). Chocó II: Phonological problems. International Journal of American Linguistics, 29 (4), 357-371.
• Loukotka, Čestmír. (1968). Classification of South American Indian languages. Los Angeles: Latin American Studies Center, University of California.
• Romoli, Kathleen. (1987). Los de la lengua de Cueva: Los grupos indígenas del istmo oriental en la época de la conquista española. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología, Instituto Colombiano de Cultura (Ediciones Tercer Mundo).