[3] In Brazil, the Yeꞌkuana are believed to have settled on the lands they now occupy more than a century ago, coming from the larger population centres in Venezuela.
Traditional mythology and oral history, however, tells that the lands around the Auari and Uraricoera rivers have long been travelled by the Yeꞌkuana.
[4] During the 18th century, there was a lot of missionary activity in Yeꞌkuana territory, during which they were forced into constructing forts for the Spanish, and coerced into converting to Catholicism.
The 20th century brought a new wave of exploitation in the form of the colonists looking to capitalise on the discovery of rubber.
The Brazilian Yeꞌkuana decided not to live in the missions established on that side of the border, because the missionaries’ attention in Brazil was focused on the Sanumá and not on them.
On the Venezuelan side of the border, this wave of missionaries brought the establishment of health services, schools, and access to local markets, also creating several relatively large communities centred around the missions.
After this, the Brazilian Yeꞌkuana decided that they did not want religion, but they did want a school, seeing the benefits that that infrastructure had provided indigenous communities in Venezuela.
So began a process of becoming sedentary, wherein the Yeꞌkuana all moved closer together, and established semi-regular schedules (including that certain times of day for children were set aside for school).
The Yeꞌkuana became known as skilled canoe makers and manioc scrapers, all while remaining fairly removed from the intense river traffic and influx of outsiders that had harmed many other indigenous communities.
The first documentations of Yeꞌkuana in the nineteenth century consist of several wordlists by Schomburgk,[6][7][8] followed by several comparative[9] and ethnographic[10] works.
The early twentieth century saw more wordlists,[11][12] moving away from works more generally about the Cariban languages[13][14] to more specifically focusing on Yeꞌkuana.
A dictionary was published on CD-ROM,[27] and most recently, Natália Cáceres’ MA thesis is a brief overview of the sociolinguistic profile of the Yeꞌkuana,[28] while her doctoral dissertation presents a more complete descriptive grammar.
The glottal stop /ʔ/ is always treated as part of the syllable coda for the purposes of assigning stress (see below) and can also be realized as laryngealization (creaky voice) on the preceding vowel.
In Venezuela, the one in widest official use was devised in the 1970s according to the conventions of the Venezuelan Indigenous Languages Alphabet (ALIV) (with some later modifications).
Earlier orthographies designed by missionaries still see some usage, however, and speakers in Brazil and in the Venezuelan state of Amazonas in particular often use a somewhat different system.
In terms of verbalisation, there is the benefactive ‘give N to someone, bring N to something’, such as a’deu ‘language, word’ becoming a’deu-tö ‘read, repeat’; its reverse, the privative (womü ‘clothes’ -> i-womü-ka ‘undress someone); a general verbalisation suffix -ma; -nö which can be used to make transitive verbs; -ta which can be used to make intransitive verbs such as vomit and speak; and the occasional suffixes -dö, -wü, and -’ñö.
It does not occur frequently in the elicited data in Cáceres (2011),[2] and it indicates an event for which a probability of its taking place exists, without certainty.
The language presents several strategies for changing the valency of a verb, primarily a detransitiviser prefix and several causativiser suffixes.
Transitive verb roots beginning (at the surface level) with e take the detransitive prefix öt-: eeka'to bite'öt-ööka'to bite oneself'eeka öt-ööka{'to bite'} {'to bite oneself'}eicha'to paint'öt-öicha'to paint oneself'eicha öt-öicha{'to paint'} {'to paint oneself'}Transitive roots beginning with o, or with e where the second vowel is [+round] take ot-: ooneja'to measure'ot-ooneja'to fight'ooneja ot-ooneja{'to measure'} {'to fight'}enku'to'to lie'ot-onku'to'to be mistaken'enku'to ot-onku'to{'to lie'} {'to be mistaken'}Transitive roots beginning with a take at-: a'dojo'to drop'at-a'dojo'to fall'a'dojo at-a'dojo{'to drop'} {'to fall'}aiyo'to break'at-aiyo'to break oneself (fracture)'aiyo at-aiyo{'to break'} {'to break oneself (fracture)'}For the most part, the patterning of the allomorphs is phonologically-based, however, some roots have slight differences in meaning depending on the allomorph they receive: adö'to carry'a-adö'to be carried'at-adö'to follow'adö a-adö at-adö{'to carry'} {'to be carried'} {'to follow'}ajöi'to take'a-ajöi'to attach oneself'at-ajöi??