In far-eastern Guna Yala, the community of New Caledonia is near the site where Scottish explorers tried, unsuccessfully, to establish a colony in the "New World".

These migrations were caused partly by wars with the Catio people, but some sources contend that they were mostly due to bad treatment by the Spanish invaders.

This was bitterly resisted, culminating in a short-lived yet successful revolt in 1925 known as the Tule Revolution (or people revolution), led by Iguaibilikinyah Nele Gantule of Ustupu and supported by American adventurer and part-time diplomat Richard Marsh[2] – and a treaty in which the Panamanians agreed to give the Kuna some degree of cultural autonomy.

Equally, the old digraph ⟨ch⟩ becomes ⟨ss⟩ or ⟨ds⟩ depending on its morphological precedence (narassole [naraʧole] < naras + sole, godsa [koʧa] 'called' < godde 'to call' + -sa (past).

So, the reformed orthography uses only the fifteen letters ⟨b, d, g, l, m, n, r, s, w, y; a, e, i, o, u⟩ for transcribing all the sounds of the language, with the digraphs ⟨bb, dd, gg, ll, mm, nn, ss⟩ for the tense consonants.

Most of the morphological complexity is found in the verb, which contains suffixes of tense and aspect, plurals, negatives, position (sitting, standing, etc.)