Aikanã is traditionally spoken in the Terra Indígena Tubarão-Latundê, where it is still the dominant language. It is also spoken in the Terra Indígena Kwazá do Rio São Pedro, where Kwazá is traditionally spoken. A few Aikanã families in also reside in the Terra Indígena Rio Guaporé, but they do not speak the language there. There are nearly 100 ethnic Aikanã (locally known as Kassupá) people, in the Comunidade Indígena Cassupá e Salamãi, although the final Aikanã speaker there died in 2018.[5]
Classification
Van der Voort (2005) observes similarities among Aikanã, Kanoê, and Kwaza, and believes that it is strong enough to definitively link the three languages together as part of a single language family.[6] An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013)[7] also found lexical similarities between Aikanã and Kwaza. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.
Jolkesky (2016) also notes that there are lexical similarities with Kanoe, Kwaza, and Nambikwara due to contact.[8]
^Epps, Patience; Michael, Lev, eds. (2023). Amazonian Languages: Language Isolates. Volume I: Aikanã to Kandozi-Chapra. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN978-3-11-041940-5.
^Van der Voort, Hein. 2005. Kwaza in a comparative perspective. International Journal of American Linguistics 71: 365–412.
^Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013).
^da Silva, Maria de Fátima dos Santos (2012). Dicionário de raízes da língua aikanã. Guajará-Mirim: Universidade Federal de Rondônia.
^Epps, Patience; Michael, Lev, eds. (2023). Amazonian Languages: Language Isolates. Volume II: Kanoé to Yurakaré. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN978-3-11-043273-2.