Yurakaré

Project Statistics

  • Sessions: 2131
  • Audio recordings: 1588
  • Video recordings: 1143
  • Annotations: 889
  • Images: 512

Last update: 2017-6-18

river with lots of stones on the shore

The Yurakaré language is spoken by the people of the same name (also Yuracaré, Yurucare, Yurujure) who form a small indigenous group that lives in the foothill area of the Andes in central Bolivia (see Geography). There are no reliable figures to date for the number of speakers (claims by different authors range from 200 to over 3,000), but most estimates revolve around 2,500 speakers. The Yurakaré have sometimes been considered to be divided in two “sub-groups” (D’Orbigny 1839, Métraux 1942), which are now viewed by some as dialect groups (Gordon, ed. 2005, see also www.ethnologue.com) but this is an error that needs to be revised. Ethnohistorical research shows that the Yurakaré people are a homogenous group culturally and linguistically (see People and Culture). Even though there are slight local variations between the communities of speakers, these differences do not permit an internal dialectal classification.

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