[3] This grouping, still widely used by linguists, classifies Panare as a member of the Southern Amazonian branch, with no cousin languages.
However, Spike Gildea has criticized this grouping as relying on faulty data used for earlier classifications by Durbin and Loukotka that have been since rejected.
[4] This classification has been considered an improvement by linguists such as Lyle Campbell and Doris & Thomas Payne, but it has yet to replace the Kaufman grouping, largely due to its relative youth.
Panare contains approximately 14 contrasting consonant phonemes, with variation depending on dialect and origins of certain lexical items (see: Notes).
There are also records of these two phones occurring in free variation, which may be attributed to once-distinct dialects being merged into communities of speakers with idiolectical contrasts.
[11] This kind of "object-initial tendency" is quite common in Amazonia, where sentence structure is often more consistently arranged through clause construction type than word order.
"people") in their own language) live in Bolívar, Venezuela, west of the Cuchivero basin of the Orinoco River.