Zamuco

Zamuco is a small language family of the north-eastern Gran Chaco in Paraguay and the Santa Cruz lowlands of Bolivia. Its two surviving tongues are Ayoreo, spoken by nomadic hunter-gatherers between the Paraguay and Pilcomayo rivers, and Yshyr, the language of the Chamacoco people along the Paraguay river.

Specialists disagree whether the family is one language with deep dialects or several separate tongues. The languages drew early missionary attention: a grammar of Zamuco was written as early as 1696, and Jesuits described Yshyr during the eighteenth century.

In the 1720s the Jesuits opened the San Ignacio Zamuco mission to convert the Ayoreo, but the station was abandoned in the 1740s, and the Chaco peoples kept their speech and their forest life largely to themselves for the rest of the colonial period.