Itoto Majun

Itoto Majun, long recorded in Spanish sources as Cumanagoto or Chaima, is a Cariban language of the Venezuelan coast, once heard from the Paria Peninsula westward to the Lake of Valencia. Its speakers called it choto maimuru, the tongue of the people; colonial writers found that peoples with separate names understood one another with only dialectal differences.

The Spanish built missions among them in the seventeenth century: the Province of New Catalonia, founded in 1633 and also called the Province of the Cumanagotos, was merged into New Andalusia in 1654.

Franciscan friars studied the language for preaching, Manuel de Yangües completing a grammar in 1663 and Francisco de Tauste printing his grammar and vocabulary in 1680. The language was long one of the leading Indigenous languages of the Cumaná region.