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Resígaro is an Arawakan language spoken in the department of Loreto in Peru. It is believed to be nearly extinct as of 2017 with only one remaining speaker.[2][3]
Aikhenvald (1999) classifies it among the Western Nawiki Upper Amazonian languages. Kaufman (1994) had made it a separate branch of Upper Amazonian.
During the Putumayo genocide, many Resígaro people were enslaved by Julio Cesar Arana's rubber company. Resígaro's entrapped by Arana's company were dedicated to the extraction of rubber at the stations of La Sabana and Santa Catalina, which was managed by the Rodriguez brothers.[4] In 1910, a manager of Arana's company told Roger Casement that the Rodriguez brothers had killed hundreds of indigenous people.[5]
On November 25, 2016 the last female speaker of Resígaro, Rosa Andrade, was brutally murdered in a beheading at the age of 67. Her niece reported “She was beheaded. Her head was not found, neither her heart.”[6]
The only other remaining speaker known was Andrade's brother, Pablo Andrade, who still lives. He and his late sister had been preparing a project with the Ministry of Culture to document their language since October 2016, and to update books on grammar and an outdated dictionary made in the 1950s by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, that promoted the translation of the Bible.[6]
Resígaro has many morphological borrowings from Bora, such as pronouns, number markings, and case markers. However, there are relatively few lexical loanwords.[7]
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