Cashinahua – or Hantxa Kuin as it is called by its speakers – belongs to the Panoan family. It is an agglutinating language with prototypical roots for nouns, verbs, adverbs and a restricted class of adjectives. Nevertheless, the verb-noun opposition is not consistent. In addition, lexical categories are determined by their suffixation and respective utterance position. The default word order is SOV.

There are about 30 Panoan languages, most of which still have native speakers and about a third being already extinct. All Panoan languages are concentrated in one geographic region, the Amazonian lowlands in Eastern Peru and in adjacent parts of Brazil and Bolivia.