Trumai language

Trumai is an endangered language isolate spoken by the Trumai people located in the Xingu reserve along the Upper Xingu River in central Brazil. Most Trumai are fluent in languages of wider communication, and children are not learning it well. It is highly divergent from other South American languages, such as distinguishing unusual consonants. Murphy and Quain reported that there were only 25 people remaining in the Trumai community. This has since increased to 94 as of 1997, of which 51 people spoke the Trumai language. In the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Grimes observes that there are 78 speakers as of 2003. Due to the popularity of speaking Portuguese among the local population, Trumai is considered an extremely endangered language because the children are not learning to speak it as a first language.