Key facts
- Pronunciation
- [ waˈjuːnaiki ]
- Native to
- Venezuela , Colombia
- Region
- Guajira Peninsula , Lake Maracaibo
- Ethnicity
- 790,000 Wayuu people (2011 & 2019 censuses)
- Native speakers
- 420,000 (2008–2012)
- Language family
- Arawakan Northern Ta-Arawakan Wayuu
- Writing system
- Latin script
- Regulated by
- Centro Etnoeducativo Kamusuchiwoꞌu
- Iso 639 3
- guc
- Glottolog
- wayu1243
- Elp
- Guajiro
via Wikipedia infobox
~11 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Wayuu (Wayuu: Wayuunaiki [waˈjuːnaiki]), or Guajiro, is the most widely-spoken Arawakan language, spoken by 400,000 Indigenous Wayuu people in northwestern Venezuela and northeastern Colombia on the Guajira Peninsula and surrounding Lake Maracaibo.
There were an estimated 300,000 speakers of Wayuunaiki in Venezuela in 2012 and another 120,000 in Colombia in 2008, approximately half the ethnic population of 400,000 in Venezuela (2011 census) and 400,000 in Colombia (2018 census). Smith (1995) reports that a mixed Wayuu—Spanish language is replacing Wayuunaiki in both countries. However, Campbell (1997) could find no information on this.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Wayuu” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.