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Waicuri
Guaicurian, Guaycura
Native to	Mexico
Region	Baja California
Ethnicity	Guaycura
Era	last attested 1768
Language family	unclassified (Guaicurian)
Dialects	?Huchití
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)
Linguist List	qjg Guaicura (Waikura, Waykuri)
	qea Waicuri (Waicuru)
	qny Cora (Huchití)
Glottolog	guai1237  Guaicurian monq1236  Monqui
The location of Guaycura. Monqui and Pericú are essentially unattested;Cochimí, which is also extinct, is aYuman language.

Waikuri (Guaycura, Waicura) is an extinct language of southernBaja California spoken by the Waikuri orGuaycura people. The Jesuit priestJohann Jakob Baegert documented words, sentences and texts in the language between 1751 and 1768.

Waikuri may be, along with theYukian andChumashan languages and other languages of southern Baja such asPericú, among the oldest languages established in California, before the arrival of speakers ofPenutian,Uto-Aztecan, and perhaps evenHokan languages. All are spoken in areas with long-established populations of a distinct physical type.^[1]

The ethnonym Waikuri and its variants likely originates from thePericú wordguaxoro 'friend'. Variations of the name includeWaicuri, Waicuri, Guaicuri, Waicura, Guaycura, Guaicura, Waicuro, Guaicuro, Guaycuro, Vaicuro, Guaicuru, Guaycuru, Waikur.^[2]: 187

Baegert's data is analyzed by Raoul Zamponi (2004). On existing evidence, Guaycura appears to be unrelated to theYuman languages to its north. Some linguists have suggested that it belonged to the widely scatteredHokan phylum of California and Mexico (Gursky 1966; Swadesh 1967); however, the evidence for this seems inconclusive (Laylander 1997; Zamponi 2004; Mixco 2006).William C. Massey (1949) suggested a connection withPericú, but the latter is too meagerly attested to support a meaningful comparison. Other languages of southern Baja are essentially undocumented, though people have speculated from non-linguistic sources that Monqui (Monquí-Didiú), spoken in a small region aroundLoreto, may have been a 'Guaicurian' language, as perhaps was Huchití (Uchití), though that may have actually been a variety of Guaycura itself (Golla 2007).

The internal classification of Guaicurian (Waikurian) languages is uncertain. Massey (1949), cited in Campbell (1997:169), gives this tentative classification based on similarity judgments given by colonial-era sources, rather than actual linguistic data.

However, Laylander (1997) and Zamponi (2004) conclude that Waikuri andPericú are unrelated.

Consonants were voiceless stopsp t c k and maybe a glottal stop; voicedb d, nasalm n ny, flapr, trillrr, and approximantsw y.

Waikuri had four vowels, /i, e, a, u/. Whether or not vowel length wasphonemic is unknown.^[2]

The little we know of Guaycura grammar was provided byFrancisco Pimentel, who analyzed a few verbs and phrases. Guaicura was a polysyllabic language that involved much compounding. For example, 'sky' istekerakadatemba, fromtekaraka (arched) anddatemba (earth).

Beagert and Pimentel agree that the plural is formed with a suffix-ma. However, Pimentel also notes a prefixk- with the 'same' function. For example,kanai 'women', fromanai 'woman'. According to Pimentel, the negation in-ra of an adjective resulted in its opposite, so fromataka 'good' is derivedatakara 'bad'.

Pronouns were as follows (Golla 2011):

Waikuri vocabulary from Zamponi (2004), which was compiled primarily from 18th-century sources by Johann Jakov Baegert,^[3] as well as from Lamberto Hostell and Francisco de Ortega:^[2]

ThePater Noster is recorded in Guaycura, with a literalgloss by Pimentel (1874: cap. XXV).

Wiktionary has a word list atAppendix:Waikuri word list

• Golla, Victor. 2007.Atlas of the World's Languages.
• Golla, Victor. 2011.California Indian Languages.

• Gursky, Karl-Heinz (January 1966)."On the Historical Position of Waikuri".International Journal of American Linguistics.32 (1):41–45.doi:10.1086/464877.ISSN 0020-7071.
• Laylander, Don. 1997. "The linguistic prehistory of Baja California". InContributions to the Linguistic Prehistory of Central and Baja California, edited by Gary S. Breschini and Trudy Haversat, pp. 1–94. Coyote Press, Salinas, California.
• Massey, William C. 1949. "Tribes and languages of Baja California".Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 5:272–307.
• Mixco, Mauricio J. 2006. "The indigenous languages". InThe Prehistory of Baja California: Advances in the Archaeology of the Forgotten Peninsula, edited by Don Laylander and Jerry D. Moore, pp. 24–41. University Press of Florida, Gainesville.
• Swadesh, Morris. 1967. "Lexicostatistical Classification". inLinguistics, edited by Norman A. McQuown, pp. 79–115. Handbook of Middle American Indians, Vol. 5, Robert Wauchope, general editor. University of Texas Press, Austin.

• Indigenous languages of the Americas
• Extinct languages
• Language isolates of North America
• Languages extinct in the 18th century
• 18th-century disestablishments in North America

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