Tucanoan

Tucanoan is a family of around two dozen languages of the north-western Amazon, spoken along the Vaupés and neighbouring rivers. It divides into Eastern and Western branches, and scholars reconstruct a common ancestral Proto-Tukanoan behind them.

The region is remarkable for linguistic exogamy: a man must marry a woman of another language group, so wives bring their tongues into the longhouse, and children grow up hearing their father's language, their mother's and those of surrounding households. Most people command several Tucanoan languages, while a shared regional language serves trade and inter-village dealings.

Long contact with neighbouring families left borrowed words on both sides. In the centuries after 1337 these riverine societies lay beyond the effective reach of the colonial frontier, and the family was carried on orally, its languages kept distinct because each marked the identity of the clan born into it.