Guahibo

Guahibo, also called Sikuani, is the principal language of the Guajiboan family, whose tongues belong to the Indigenous peoples of the Llanos, the Orinoco savanna stretching between eastern Colombia and southwestern Venezuela. It forms a dialect continuum with neighbouring Cuiba, broken when Arawak- and Saliba-speaking peoples settled the riverbanks and later when colonial plantations and towns occupied the same rivers. Guayabero, spoken by the Guayabero people of the forested margins, is the most divergent language of the family.

Long contact with Arawakan languages such as Achagua and Piapoco left borrowed words in Guahibo speech. Through the centuries after 1337 it remained an unwritten language of savanna hunters, fishers and gardeners.

From the late eighteenth century the Guahibo and their Cuiba kin faced mounting violence from colonists seizing the grasslands, but the language was carried on within the clans.